The thirteen stories of Dialogues in Paradise are eloquent in a way the West associates with both the modern and the ancient: the dark oracles of Aeschylus and Sophocles, the paranoid mystery of Kafka, the moving stream of Woolf. The work of Can Xue (a pseudonym of Changsa writer Deng Xiao-hua) renews our consciousness of the long tradition of the irrational in our literature, where dreams and reality constitute one territory, its borders open, the passage back and forth barely discernible. She fuses lyrical purity with the darkest visions of the grotesque and the result is a unique literary experience.

Vivid, compassionate, and often disturbing, this expansive novel is John Gardner's masterpiece.

These are the scenarios of just some of the stories in this generous new collection by Can Xue. Although rooted in the folk traditions of Chinese literature and the real conflicts of contemporary Chinese life, Can Xue's stories exist in a separate space and time where dreams and reality coalesce: tenderness quickly turns to violence, strange diseases are caught, and quaint landscapes become phantasmagorical.

The most ambitious work of fiction by a writer widely considered the most important novelist working in China today In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flowerbeds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee—whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can only be reached underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions. Can Xue's masterful love stories for the new millennium trace love's many guises—satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling—against a kaleidoscopic backdrop drawn from East and West of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, sex and romance.

A haunting classic from the author of All Quiet on the Western Front, Shadows in Paradise reveals the deepest scars of the men and women who experienced the Holocaust. After years of hiding and surviving near death in a concentration camp, Ross is finally safe. Now living in New York City among old friends, far from Europe’s chilling atrocities, Ross soon meets Natasha, a beautiful model and fellow émigré, a warm heart to help him forget his cold memories. Yet even as the war draws to its violent close, Ross cannot find peace. Demons still pursue him. Whether they are ghosts from the past or the guilt of surviving, he does not know. For he is only beginning to understand that freedom is far from easy—and that paradise, however perfect, has a price. “The world has a great writer in Erich Maria Remarque. He is a craftsman of unquestionably first rank, a man who can bend language to his will. Whether he writes of men or of inanimate nature, his touch is sensitive, firm, and sure.”—The New York Times Book Review

The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem. “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage. “A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate.” —Los Angeles Times

The first full-length novel by Chinese author Can Xue to appear in English Five Spice Street tells the story of a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Some think X is 50 years old; others that she is 22. Some believe she has occult powers and has thereby enslaved the young men of the street; others think she is a clever trickster playing mind games with the common people. Who is Madam X? How has she brought the good people of Five Spice Street to their knees either in worship or in exasperation? The unknown narrator takes no sides in the endless interplay of visions, arguments, and opinions. The investigation rages, as the street becomes a Walpurgisnacht of speculations, fantasies, and prejudices. Madam X is a vehicle whereby the people bare their souls, through whom they reveal themselves even as they try to penetrate the mystery of her extraordinary powers.Five Spice Street is one of the most astonishing novels of the past twenty years. Exploring the collective consciousness of this little street of ordinary people, Can Xue penetrates the deepest existential anxieties of the present day—whether in China or in the West—where the inevitable impermanence of identity struggles with the narrative within which identity must compose itself.