I Live in the Slums

Longlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize

A major new collection of stories by one of the most exciting and creative voices in contemporary Chinese literature.

I Live in the Slums by Can Xue observes no obvious conventions of plot or characterisation. That is the only rule it follows. Instead, it tends to limn a disordered and poetic state, given structure by philosophical wonder and emotional rigour.

Combining elements of both Chinese materiality—the love of physical things—and Western abstract thinking, Can Xue invites her readers into an immersive landscape that blends empirical fact and illusion, mixes the physical and spiritual, and probes the space between consciousness and oblivion. She brings us to a place that is both readily familiar yet unmappable and makes us hyperaware of the inherent unreliability in our relationship to the world around us.

Delightful, enchanting, and filled with secrets, Can Xue’s newest collection shines a light on the forces that give contours to the visible terrain we acknowledge as reality.