Elsewhere
Stories
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for THE STORY PRIZE | A New Yorker BEST BOOK of 2023 | MOST ANTICIPATED by Nylon • Rolling Stone • The Millions
From multi-award-winning author Yan Ge, a shimmering, genre-bending English-language debut that announces the next phase in a major literary career.
“As haunting, dreamlike, and addictive as a melatonin-induced slumber.” —Nylon
“Deft... Elsewhere [explores] the power of language across the Chinese diaspora to either bring people together or push them apart.”—The New York Times
In twenty years, Yan Ge has authored thirteen books written in Chinese, working across an impressive range of genres and subjects. Now, Yan Ge transposes her dynamic storytelling onto another linguistic landscape. The result is a collection humming with her trademark wit and style—and with the electricity of a seasoned artist flexing her virtuosity with a new medium.
A young woman bonds with an encampment of poets after a devastating earthquake. Against her better judgment, a college student begins to fall for an acquaintance who might be dead. And a Confucian disciple returns to the Master bearing a jar full of grisly remains. Weaving between reality and dreamy surreality, these nine stories wend toward elsewhere, a comforting, frustrating, just-out-of-reach place familiar to anyone who has ever experienced longing. Through it all Yan Ge’s protagonists peer thoughtfully at their own feelings of displacement—physical or emotional, the result of travel, emigration, or exile. Brilliant and irresistibly readable, Elsewhere explores the utility (or not) of art in the face of lonesomeness, quotidian, and spectacular.
This highly anticipated collection is further proof that Yan Ge is a generational literary talent, to be watched closely for decades to come.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yan (Strange Beasts of China) explores human connections and disruptions in this ethereal collection. "The Little House" follows Pigeon, a young writer who joins assorted strangers living in a tent city days after China's massive 2008 earthquake. Despite being a vegetarian, Pigeon eats meat at the tent city, where she finds a sense of community. In "Shooting an Elephant," a Chinese woman named Shanshan adjusts to life with her Irish husband, Declan, in Dublin, where she feels a sense of wonder ("In this foreign city, her anonymity soothed her, although she was struck that, here, anyone could turn to her at any moment and start a conversation about practically anything"). As winter sets in, Shanshan asks Declan to take her to Ikea, where the escalators and familiar goods remind her of China. As the story unfolds, readers learn about a rift between the couple and their attempt to mend it. In "Stockholm," the narrator takes a solo trip from London to Sweden to speak on a literary panel, where her host, a man, belittles her for having to pump her breast milk, prompting her to imagine a postapocalyptic world in which she's the last remaining human and survives on her own milk. Here and elsewhere, Yan combines dry and subtle humor with her evocative lyrical style. These stories brim with intelligence. Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the origin point of a character's trip to Stockholm.
