Welcome to the first issue of the Cold Window Newsletter to be published on Paper Republic! This is the (extra-long) first installment of a new monthly collaboration that will be appearing in the Paper Republic feed each month. Read on for an introduction to the newsletter; a round-up of 2024’s most acclaimed Chinese short fiction; and profiles of two of China’s best literary suspense novelists.
Introduction: What is the Cold Window Newsletter?
I started this newsletter last fall because I wished that there were more spaces on the English-language internet dedicated to talking about Chinese-language writing that hasn’t been translated yet. For those of us who are interested in Chinese literature but do most of our reading in English, it’s hard to get a sense for what the Chinese literary world is buzzing about at any given time. And while excellent projects like Spittoon, the Leeds Center for New Chinese Writing Book Club, and Paper Republic itself can give you a snapshot of fiction from China that has already been translated into English, where can you go to hear about Chinese fiction that is still too new to be translated, or that may already have been waiting for years for the right translator to come along?
Thus was the Cold Window Newsletter born.
This project is for:
- Translators and publishers in search of overlooked writers who deserve exposure abroad. I’ll focus on writers whose works have rarely or never been translated into English before, and I’ll give a rundown of any coverage they may have received in English to date.
- Advanced language learners who advice on which stories to read. If Chinese isn’t your first language, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer breadth of fiction out there. Doing deep dives into the back catalogs of every potentially interesting author isn’t a realistic option if your reading speed in Chinese is slow (I would put myself in that camp!). I’m hoping that these profiles will help you figure out which pieces you might be interested in before you start reading, so you don’t have to dive in blind.
Some promises and disclaimers:
- I’ll be up front about which works I’ve read, and which I know just by reputation. I won’t recommend books that I haven’t read myself.
- The format of this project is indebted to several excellent preexisting newsletters that focus on contemporary art and media in China, including Jake Newby’s Concrete Avalanche, Michael Hong’s Mando Gap, and Em’s Active Faults. I also want to recommend Na Zhong’s What China’s Reading column at the China Books Review, which has been one of the best places to learn about new literary releases in China since she started writing it in 2023.
List: Critically Acclaimed Chinese Short Fiction of 2024
In January, I conducted an unscientific round-up of Best Books of the Year lists that mostly featured ambitious creative nonfiction projects and novels by long-established authors. But if you dig just under the top layer of prestigious, widely circulated books that crowded the top of those lists, you’ll find a rich crop of short story and novella collections that won wide acclaim last year, including from many young writers who hadn’t been well-known in China until 2024.
Here’s a rundown of some of those writers. If my survey last month was unscientific, this month’s is even more so, drawing primarily from my sense of who was getting talked about in my circles rather than from an objective accounting of published critical opinion. Take it as a reading list for the new year and/or a watchlist for writers who are going places—that’s what I’ll be doing.
《岛屿的厝》(Islands Against the Current, 2024)
At the top of the list are a vanguard of young writers—coincidentally all women—who came out with acclaimed collections last year that significantly increased their profiles:
- Lin Gesheng, whose debut collection 《纷纷水火》Water and Fire Pouring Down “deftly [blends] elements of horror, detective fiction and sci-fi” in its title story to explore the “fear, grief and voluntary or forced amnesia” of pandemic lockdowns, as Na Zhong wrote on the China Books Review last year
- Gu Wenyan, from Zhejiang, of whose collection 《一跃而下》Jumping Down Zhang Pingjin wrote: “It has a unique style that blends passionate seriousness with knowing self-mockery... You understand it intuitively; it makes you chuckle constantly and sets your brain churning.”
- And finally, Li Jingrui (author of 《木星时刻》Jupiter Time) and 叶昕昀 Ye Xinyun (author of 《最小的海》The Smallest Sea), whose collections I frequently spotted in readers’ hands out in the wild in 2024 even though they technically came out in late 2023
New work by favorite writers of this newsletter also appeared on various best-of lists:
- In the same Arts and Culture Criticism feature, Zheng Xiaolü (featured below) won a nod for his collection 《南方巴赫》Southern Bach.
- Sun Pin (featured below) had new novellas entered into the highly prestigious literary awards lists announced by both Harvest Literary Magazine and Yangtze Literary Review, and Ban Yu (featured in CWN#2) placed first on the Harvest best short story list for his new piece 《飞鸟与地下》 “The Bird and the Underground.”
《生死结》(The Knot of Life and Death, 2024)
A few long-established writers came out with well-reviewed new collections:
- Just below her on the Douban list was the late Tibetan writer and filmmaker Pema Tseden and his posthumous fiction collection 《松木的清香》The Fresh Scent of the Pines.
And finally, three young authors to look out for in 2025: Du Li, Zhu Jing, and Wang Yujue. They didn’t release books in 2024, but their ubiquity in literary magazines throughout the year and on year-end short fiction roundups is a sure sign that they’re poised to release major collections soon. Let’s see in a year if I was right...
Feature: Novellas at the intersection of highbrow and hard-boiled
My favorite source for new Chinese fiction recommendations is the nomination list for the Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Award 宝珀理想国文学奖. The award is limited to writers under 40, so it tends to be a pretty reliable who’s-who of authors who have been gathering critical attention for a few years but are still too early in their careers to be household names. Best of all, the award has a pretty good track record of recognizing short fiction collections (although this year’s surprise winner, A Bit of Wood on Open Land《土广寸木》 by Wei Sixiao, is a full-length novel). Pick a collection from the list of past winners and nominees, pull up its title story, and you can be pretty confident that you have a worthwhile read in your hands.
Unintentionally, but unsurprisingly, most of the writers I’ve previously profiled in this newsletter have been Blancpain-Imaginist nominees. In this issue, I’ll add two more, one from last year’s shortlist and one from 2021. Prestigious nominations aren’t the only thing these writers have in common: they’re also both from the same generation (80后, or born after 1980), and they’re both literary writers who know how to write a heart-pounding suspense story.
《南方巴赫》(Southern Bach, 2024)
We’ll start with Zheng Xiaolü, born 1986, whose collection Southern Bach《南方巴赫》won him wide acclaim in 2024. I only started reading Zheng recently, but he’s by no means a newcomer on the literary scene—as early as 2011, when he was only 25, the eminent Can Xue named him as her pick for a Words Without Borders series focusing on emerging authors. The translation that resulted from that nod somehow remains the only time his fiction has appeared in English, but hopefully the new attention that Southern Bach received will help change that.
Zheng is a painterly writer, but his pacing and characters are borrowed directly from hard-boiled crime. This isn’t an especially unusual combination in Chinese fiction—Dongbei Renaissance writing, for instance, often wades into the territory of crime fiction—but I’m not aware of many contemporary writers who can pivot as quickly from an achingly beautiful nature scene to a vicious brawl as Zheng can. Take this introspective scene from “Saltwater Town” 《盐湖城》, which directly precedes the story’s bloody climax:
If you’re looking for an introduction to his work, and have time for a longer novella, I recommend “Southern Bach” 《南方巴赫》, the title story of last year’s collection. The novella starts slow, with a bored teen stuck in his uncle’s small town studying to get his driver’s license. But as he starts to snoop around his uncle’s private life, and as he starts to develop a strange attachment to a mysterious girl he met over social media, a mounting sense of dread starts to creep over the novella. Early on, the girl tells him half of a story about a pair of sheep who fall into a deep pit in a secluded forest. The payoff to this dangling thread, near the very end of the novella, is probably the most pulse-pounding scene I’ve ever encountered in contemporary Chinese fiction. Hopefully we’ll see it in English one day.
Born 1986
Available in English: “The Festival of Ghosts” 《鬼节》(full story; interview)
Sun Pin, born 1983, is one of the most prominent “post-80s” authors in all of China. It’s truly a crime that almost none of her fiction has been translated into English yet—maybe because novellas, her preferred form, can have a hard time finding a home in the English-language publishing market. If you’ve read Sun Pin before, you’ll know that her novellas are often suffused with a sense of whimsy and everyday magic that can easily tip over into the unnerving when she wants it to. There’s an image in her 2023 novella “Magician by the Sea”《海边魔术师》 that captures this well: a tiny human figure at the top of a towering construction crane, emerging from his tiny control room to stroll back and forth along the crane arm. There’s something both adorable and terrifying about his exercises far above the narrator’s head, as though he’s about to take flight. That suspense is ever-present in Sun’s fiction: when will the whimsy finally teeter into disaster?
《以鸟兽之名》(In the Name of Beasts, 2021)
My favorite piece by her happens to be the title story of a collection shortlisted for the Blancpain-Imaginist prize in 2021: “In the Name of Beasts” 《以鸟兽之名》, a murder mystery that veers much closer to Zheng Xiaolü-style crime fiction than is typical for Sun. The author herself is from a remote town in northern China’s Shanxi Province, but here she adopts the narrative voice of an outsider looking in at her home region. Her narrator is a crime writer looking for material for his next novel in an eerie suburban community, recently constructed to house villagers removed by the government from their isolated mountain homes. Shunned by the villagers, the writer grows closer and closer to You Xiaolong, an eccentric, animated young resident whose increasingly erratic behavior both fascinates and repels him. The distrustful villagers, the indecipherable You Xiaolong, the prejudiced narrator, and the spectre of a murder combine to create an exquisite tension that doesn’t let up until the last page.
Born 1983
Available in English: “The Balcony” 《在阳台上》(full story); “Shadow“ 《相生》(Chinese Arts and Letters, Oct. 2016)
That’s all this time. Feel free to visit the newsletter on its home site to read the archive and subscribe for future installments. Next issue: a translation collective you should know, and a journey to Dongbei. Thanks for reading!
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