Loved this survey—exactly the antidote to the “no good lit in China anymore” trope. Your through-line (post-80s writers, mostly women, pushing speculative edges and internet vernacular into realist frames) really tracks. The snapshot on forms was especially useful: the dominance of long novellas explains why so much that feels electric in Chinese never quite surfaces in English periodicals.
A few beats that stuck with me:
Guo Shuang’s “Push Out the Pig” as a class/fandom case study—perfectly pitched as an entry point for readers curious about contemporary China beyond sci-fi.
Du Li’s hallucinatory “Cuckoo Vanishes”—love the comparison to Chen Chuncheng but with nightmare aesthetics dialed up.
Zhang Tianyi as “rainforest” fiction—amen. The Hogwarts skinsuit satire in “The Beanstalk” sounds wild in the best way.
Two q’s:
If someone reads Chinese slowly, which single story from your top 3 is the most forgiving linguistically without sacrificing payoff?
Any translations in the pipeline for Mo Yin or Du Li—or places you’d like to see novella-length translations run? (I’d happily read/boost sample translations.)
Also co-sign: the cover design is crushing the U.S. market right now.
Thanks for the kind words, Pedro! The Guo Shuang story is definitely the most approachable language-wise -- a bit long, but engaging and not difficult to follow if you take your time. Added benefit: the whole story is available free online (linked above, just under Guo Shuang's author portrait.)
As for novella-length translations... Part of the reason that novellas have mostly vanished from the Anglophone world these last few decades is that we mostly don't read our fiction in serialized form anymore. But, who knows -- now that we've revived our serial habit on Substack, can the novella make a comeback? I'd love to think that, someday in the future, literary Substacks will offer a route to publication for all the excellent novellas that have gone unpublished and untranslated up till this point...
Loved this survey—exactly the antidote to the “no good lit in China anymore” trope. Your through-line (post-80s writers, mostly women, pushing speculative edges and internet vernacular into realist frames) really tracks. The snapshot on forms was especially useful: the dominance of long novellas explains why so much that feels electric in Chinese never quite surfaces in English periodicals.
A few beats that stuck with me:
Guo Shuang’s “Push Out the Pig” as a class/fandom case study—perfectly pitched as an entry point for readers curious about contemporary China beyond sci-fi.
Du Li’s hallucinatory “Cuckoo Vanishes”—love the comparison to Chen Chuncheng but with nightmare aesthetics dialed up.
Zhang Tianyi as “rainforest” fiction—amen. The Hogwarts skinsuit satire in “The Beanstalk” sounds wild in the best way.
Two q’s:
If someone reads Chinese slowly, which single story from your top 3 is the most forgiving linguistically without sacrificing payoff?
Any translations in the pipeline for Mo Yin or Du Li—or places you’d like to see novella-length translations run? (I’d happily read/boost sample translations.)
Also co-sign: the cover design is crushing the U.S. market right now.
Thanks for the kind words, Pedro! The Guo Shuang story is definitely the most approachable language-wise -- a bit long, but engaging and not difficult to follow if you take your time. Added benefit: the whole story is available free online (linked above, just under Guo Shuang's author portrait.)
As for novella-length translations... Part of the reason that novellas have mostly vanished from the Anglophone world these last few decades is that we mostly don't read our fiction in serialized form anymore. But, who knows -- now that we've revived our serial habit on Substack, can the novella make a comeback? I'd love to think that, someday in the future, literary Substacks will offer a route to publication for all the excellent novellas that have gone unpublished and untranslated up till this point...