December 2024: Granta - China Issue

This month we have a special feature on our Book Club, focusing on the recent China issue of Granta magazine.

At a time when China has become a unifying spectre of menace for Western governments, this issue of Granta seeks to bring the country’s literary culture into focus.

Featuring fiction by Yu Hua, Zou Jingzhi, Yan Lianke, Jianan Qian, Shuang Xuetao, Mo Yan, Zhang Yueran, Ban Yu, Yang Zhihan and Wang Zhanhei, essays by Xiao Hai and Han Zhang, as well as a conversation between Wu Qi and Granta. Photography from Feng Li, Haohui Liu and collaborators Li Jie and Zhang Jungang. And poetry from Huang Fan, Lan Lan, Hu Xudong and Zheng Xiaoqiong.

We're grateful to Granta for letting us reprint one of the featured stories here - 'Hunter', by Shuang Xuetao 双雪涛, translated by a long-time friend and supporter of our Centre, Jeremy Tiang. You can read the story in the original Chinese, and also in Jeremy's English translation.

Shuang Xuetao is one of a group of contemporary writers from the Northeast of China who have been making literary waves in recent years. As the editor of Granta, Thomas Meaney, says in his introduction to the issue:

The most noteworthy development in Chinese fiction has come out of Dongbei in the northeast. The leading writer of the scene, Xuetao, told me how his love of writing was born out of trying to capture the down-and-out characters spit out by his deindustrializing hometown, Shenyang. He’s particularly drawn to losers, who are, in some sense, the heart of modern Chinese literature, which is filled with failed exam-takers, unconvinced revolutionaries, disenchanted bureaucrats, disgraced husbands, bereft women, unlucky gangsters, wistful repairmen and utterly routed ne’er-do-wells. From Lu Xun’s stubborn rogue Ah-Q, who thrives off his own humiliations, to Qian Zhongshu’s fake-diploma-bearing Fang Hung-Chien, to the wife-beating gambler-turned-pauper Fugui in Yu Hua’s To Live, the twentieth-century Chinese canon presents a sharp contrast to the plucky red-cheeked heroes of China’s blockbuster films and television serials. The figures of Chinese fiction brim with resentments, and they take their revenge out on the language itself, disfiguring it and remaking it with their corrosive dialogue. They mock themselves along with their enemies, in some kind of grim acknowledgement that mutual degradation is the way of the world.

In 'Hunter', we meet Lu Dong, a classic Shuang Xuetao character - a 'fifth rate actor', by his own ranking system. At the beginning of the story he has has just been sent a script containing a part that suits him; the characters of 'a rather dull, emotional person who somehow kept doing the wrong thing.'

Shuang Xuetao (双雪涛 ) was born in 1983 on Rouge Street in the city of Shenyang, Shuang has written six volumes of fiction, for which he has won the Blossoms Literary Prize, the Wang Zengqi Short Story Prize, and, most recently, the US$50,000 Blancpain-Imaginist Award for best Chinese writer under forty-five. Shuang Xuetao lives in Beijing.

Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright and literary translator. He has translated over thirty books from across the Chinese-speaking world, including novels by Yeng Pway Ngon, Yan Ge, Lo Yi-Chin, Liu Xinwu, Shuang Xuetao, and Zhang Yueran. Most recently, his translation of Zou Jingzhi’s Ninth Building was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023. In 2022, Tiang was the Princeton University Translator-in-Residence and an International Booker Prize judge. He has also served as a judge for the National Book Award (Translated Literature). Originally from Singapore, he now divides his time between Flushing, Queens and Sarasota, Florida.

And if you want to find out more about the issue, Kaiser Kuo interviews editor Thomas Meaney on the Sinica podcast in November 2024.

(Finally - a special offer from Granta itself: Creative writing students can enjoy a special £1 digital subscription to Granta by clicking this link, as well as a 40% discount on all print subscriptions.)