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Elsewhere: Stories - Hardcover

Ge, Yan

 
9781982198480: Elsewhere: Stories
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1982198486 ISBN 13: 9781982198480
Verlag: Scribner, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Yan Ge was born in Sichuan, China in 1984. She is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English, and is the author of fourteen books in Chinese, including six novels. She has received numerous awards and was named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, including English, French, and German. The latest English translation of her novel, Strange Beasts of China, was one of the New York Times Notable Books of 2021. She was on the judging panel of the International Dublin Literary Award 2019. In 2021, she was on the final selection panel for the Laureate for Irish Fiction. Yan’s English writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Irish Times, TLS, Granta, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia where she was the recipient of the UEA International Award 2018/19. She was a MacDowell fellow in 2022. Her English language debut short story collection Elsewhere was published in 2023 and was one of the New Yorker Best Books of the Year. Yan lives in Norwich.

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<★xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-16"★> 1. The Little House THE LITTLE HOUSE
Outside the Little House, Old Stone was talking about geese.

“Their intestines. That’s the best part,” he said. “The best goose intestines come from White Family Town; do you know why★”

“No idea,” I said.

“The women there have strong and slender fingers. The perfect kind of fingers for plunging into the goose’s asshole and yanking out the entrails while it’s still alive. They do it with precision and determination. They do this in a flash to preserve its tenderness.”

“I’m a vegetarian.”

He shook his head. “Why★”

I thought about how to reply.

“That’s no good,” he said. “Plus, I don’t think I’ve seen you eating since you came here.”

“I don’t feel hungry,” I said.

He turned around to the table next to us and shouted, “Small Bamboo! Can you talk some sense into this girl★”

Small Bamboo had fallen asleep in his chair. It was almost 3 a.m.

“Anyway,” he said, turning back to me, “guess which part of the cow the yellow throat comes from★”

“Its throat★”

“Ha!” He reached for his beer and took a long pull. “I’ve asked more than a hundred people this question. Nobody’s got it right. It comes from the cow’s coronary artery. And it has to be the right one. Because the right one’s thinner than the left one, so it gets cooked very quickly in the hot pot. Do you know how many seconds it takes to cook the yellow throat★”

“Uh-uh.”

“Eight seconds. Lots of people overcook it. That’s why you should never throw a piece of yellow throat into the pot. Hold it with chopsticks and dip it into the soup. Count to eight and take it out. Only this way will it be crispy and chewy.”

“I need to go to bed now,” I said.

“Sure. You go.” He took another mouthful from his beer bottle.

“Aren’t you going to sleep★”

“Ah no, no, I’m fine. When you are old you don’t need to sleep. I’ll just get another beer.”

He stood up and walked into the Little House. The light was still on. Sister Du was curled up on a booth seat, snoring. I watched through the window as Old Stone went behind the bar, grabbed a Tsingtao, and returned.

“I’ll ask her to put it on my tab in the morning.” He slumped back into his chair.

“I’m going now. Good night.” I stood up and walked back into the tent I shared with Vertical.

Small Bamboo had brought me to the Little House three days earlier. When he bumped into me, I was sitting on a bench outside my apartment compound, reading a book.

“Hey, Pigeon,” he said, coming swiftly across the street towards me. “What are you doing here★”

“Just reading,” I said, waving my book at him. “To kill some time.”

He tilted his head and read: “The Plague. I didn’t know you kids still read Camus.”

“Some of us do.”

“Where are you staying these days★” he asked.

“I’m camping in the courtyard, with my neighbors.” I pointed back over my head.

“That’s no fun,” Small Bamboo said. “Why don’t you come with me to the Little House★ We’re all staying there in the square: Old Stone, Young Li, Six Times, Vertical, Chilly, and lots of other poets.”

“But I don’t write poems,” I said.

He grinned. “It doesn’t matter. Just come with me.”

We walked to the Little House. The buses hadn’t been running since the twelfth and there were no taxis. Small Bamboo had smoked three cigarettes by the time he finally remembered to offer me one. I told him I didn’t smoke.

“You’re sensible. Cigarettes kill you.” He nodded, taking out another one and lighting it up.

We went across the Second Ring Road and turned into Ping’an Square.

“Wow,” I said.

The sunken square was brimming with tents, of various sizes and spectacular styles, their colors spanning the full visible spectrum. Small Bamboo pointed at the building at the far end of the square and told me the Little House was on that corner. We descended into the square and wove our way through it. The tents were clustered closely together and cast shadows over one another. People sat outside, eating, chatting, bartering. Vendors elbowed past with their baskets, selling food, magazines, T-shirts, and cosmetics. Kids chased one another, laughing. We steered through, Small Bamboo nodding at acquaintances and friends. Ahead of us, I saw a gigantic scarlet tent. It looked like a castle.

“That’s Young Li’s,” Small Bamboo said. “One big living room and three bedrooms for him, his wife, and two kids. There’s even a kitchen inside. God knows where that prawn got it from!”

It was a warm late May afternoon. The air was stale and humid. We walked from the sunken square up the steps and arrived at a run-down pub. Above, three big white characters hung, which read: The Little House. A dot in the first character was missing. A large group of men and women—the poets—sat outside, drinking beer. Small Bamboo introduced me: “This is Pigeon.”

“Pigeon!” they called out together, like a choir singing.

“I’ve heard about you,” one of them, a man in his forties, said. “You’re the kid who writes fiction.”

A middle-aged woman in a red floral dress looked me up and down. “You seem like a smart kid,” she said. “You should write poems.”

“Ignore these old drunks,” Small Bamboo said apologetically. “You go sit with Vertical.” He pointed me to a table on the side, at which a young woman and two men in their twenties sat. They waved at me gleefully.

Later I realized they were all in varying degrees of drunkenness. Some had been drinking since Monday; some had started on the evening of the twelfth. Sister Du, the owner of the Little House and Small Bamboo’s cousin, had driven her mini-truck to the wholesale market outside the city three times to restock beer. The supermarkets nearby had nothing left.

“And all of these rats here, they don’t even bother to pay,” Sister Du said. “★‘Put it on the tab’ they say—but nobody ever opened a tab!”

“I’ll have tea, please,” I said, taking out my wallet.

“Ah, come’n take a beer,” she said, and opened a Tsingtao for me. “I’ll put it on the tab.”

I took the bottle, walked outside, and sat down at the table with Vertical, her boyfriend Chilly, and Six Times. A woman with a basket approached, wondering if any of us would be interested in purchasing her goods. She lifted up the lid, revealing the little turtles inside. They were luminous, as white as pearls.

We were admiring the turtles when the alarm rang out in the sky.

“Always this time of day,” the woman said. She covered her basket and trotted away.

That night I...

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Verlag
Scribner
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1982198486
ISBN 13 
9781982198480
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande