Published in 2023
304 pages
Yan Ge (Chinese: 颜歌; born 1984) is the pen name of Chinese writer Dai Yuexing (戴月行). Yan Ge was born Dai Yuexing in 1984 in Sichuan, China. She began publishing in 1994. She completed a PhD in comparative literature at Sichuan University and is the Chair of the China Young Writers Association. Her writing uses a lot of Sichuanese, rather than Standard Chinese (Mandarin). People’s Literature (Renmin Wenxue 人民文学) magazine recently chose her – in a list reminiscent of The New Yorker‘s ‘20 under 40’ – as one of China’s twenty future literary masters. In 2012 she was chosen as Best New Writer by the prestigious Chinese Literature Media Prize (华语文学传媒大奖 最佳新人奖).
What is this book about?
From multi-award-winning author Yan Ge, a shimmering, genre-bending English-language debut that announces the next phase in a major literary career.
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.
