Can Xue

Appreciations

Quotes About Can Xue

"Can Xue is the most original voice to arise in Chinese literature since the mid-century upheavals. Although nothing is predictable here, each line as if plucked anew from space, there is nonetheless a profound organicity about this book [The Embroidered Shoes], and oddly, in spite of all its delightfully eccentric and surreal elements, it delivers a vivid sense of place—in this case, the Chinese town or village—though less in the manner of a Faulkner, Joyce or Shabai, than that of Rulfo, Kafka, Gogol. In short, there's a new world master among us and her name is Can Xue."—Robert Coover

"If China has one possibility of a Nobel laureate it is Can Xue." —Susan Sontag

"[Can Xue] invites comparison to the century's masters of decay made meaningful, to Kafka especially." —The New York Times

"[Can Xue] radically departs from the realism governing the fiction of her compatriots."—Publishers Weekly

"Can Xue's writing is among the most innovative to have appeared in China in recent years." —Times Literary Supplement

"The traditional expectation of narrative history in China has been to find a central meaning that could effectively master chaos. Can Xue's stories are like a piece of dynamite at the foundation of this elaborate edifice." —Jon Solomon, Modern Chinese Literature

"…Kafka, Schulz, and Borges. These three authors are serious company for any author and are not mentioned haphazardly; Can Xue's work is a welcome continuation of their liberating literary projects." —Matthew Badura, Center for Book Culture

"…Reading Can Xue's fiction is like running downhill in the dark; you've got momentum, but you don't know where you're headed."—The New York Tmes

"Can Xue possesses one of the most glorious, vivid, lyrical, elaborate, poignant hellacious imaginations on the planet. She is the finest revolutionary Gothicist writing today and, as well, the true daughter of Kafka and Borges. All the promise of her first collection, Dialogues in Paradise, is richly realized in The Embroidered Shoes. No reader emerges from her powerful fictional dreams unscathed, for here is a book as dangerous as it is beautiful." —Bradford Morrow

"Can Xue has always a raised a bar we couldn’t have imagined needed that much raising. She makes a student out of all of us, and I think that for any writer, much less reader, is a radical gift . . . I feel very lucky to live in the time of the great Can Xue." —Porochista Khakpour

‘A maverick outsider, the Chinese writer Can Xue described herself in a recent interview as ''an experimental novelist with a strongly philosophical temperament''. True enough, but nothing in that bland label would prepare you for the mind-stretching enchantments of The Last Lover, one of the first of her large-scale works to appear in English. . .Translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen with all the hallucinatory clarity that her prose demands, Can Xue guides us through that bewitching place.’—Boyd Tonkin, The Independent