Description
In this unsettling collection, Can Xue offers stories that refuse conventional plot and characterization, moving instead through disordered scenes and uncanny impressions that linger long after the page turns. Across a shifting landscape of urban lowlands, characters and creatures alike endure cruelty, displacement, and the grinding indifference of everyday life—most memorably in a tormented, rat-like figure driven to flee from house to house. The book’s high-level arc follows lives lived at the margins, where survival becomes a form of haunting and where violence—human and animal—echoes through cramped spaces and broken routines. With a stark, observational style that prizes strangeness over explanation, these stories probe themes of dehumanization, social neglect, and the thin, fragile line between the human and the monstrous.
Available Editions
hardcover
Yale University Press
Published May 19, 2020
344 pages
ISBN: 9780300247435
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Details
First Published
2020
Language
eng
Translation
From: chi
Content Warnings
Content and trigger warnings for I Live in the Slums by Can Xue.