Rouge Street : Three Novellas

Rouge Street presents three novellas by Shuang Xuetao, the lauded young Chinese writer whose frank, fantastical short fiction has already inspired comparisons to Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami. Located in China’s frigid northeast, Shenyang, the author’s birthplace, boasts an illustrious past - legend holds that the emperor’s makeup was manufactured here. But while the city enjoyed renewed importance as an industrial hub under Mao Zedong, China’s subsequent transition from communism to a market economy led to an array of social ills - unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce, suicide - that gritty Shenyang epitomises. Orbiting the toughest neighbourhood of a postindustrial city whose vast, inhospitable landscape makes every aspect of life a struggle, these many-voiced missives are united by Shuang Xuetao’s singular style - one that balances hardscrabble naturalism with the transcendent, and faces the bleak environs with winning humour. Lyrical, masterful, Rouge Street illuminates not only the hidden pains of those left behind in an extraordinary economic boom, but also the unlikely, nourishing grace they, nevertheless, manage to discover.