Hunter

A provincial ambulance drives through the night in search of a hospital, a fifth-rate actor goes method as a hitman on a sweltering rooftop, a legendary knife fighter is found working on the factory floor of a northern village. Hunter's stories of deceptive, brutal realism play with myth and history, offering sketches of ordinary life that take a magic realist turn.

Filled with dark humour and written with a tinge of noir, these stories grapple with the realities of life in contemporary China.

I sometimes felt like I was reading Jesus' Son with the drugs replaced by magical realism . . . Shuang's prose, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang, is hypnotic and taut, and cultural differences aside, S-- is a familiar city, gutted by globalism, its blank-faced sleepwalkers at once idiosyncratic and instantly recognizable. -- Dan Piepenbring Harpers
Hunter by Shuang Xuetao is at once personal and historical. Like an unfolding screen, the depiction of the society and its people in northern China is powerfully real, charged with black humour. Jeremy Tiang's translation has brilliantly rendered the author's sharp wit and unique literary voice. Xiaolu Guo
Brutally funny, intricate, and alive . . . Shuang's work is at ease with the fantastical, which is perhaps the disguise of the unsayable. Madeleine Thien
One of China's most celebrated young authors . . . he has been hailed for bringing attention to a time and people that China's public imagination had long written off -- Vivian Wang New York Times
Shuang Xuetao offers an unsparing portrait of life in China's industrial north-east . . . The Dongbei renaissance draws attention to places left behind by the nation's rise but also points to demand for honest, nuanced accounts of the real China The Economist
In sparse, vernacular prose, Shuang uses fabulist noir to evoke the pace of social change . . . Shuang's multi-voiced narratives both challenge and confirm that maxim, conveying the contested legacies of recent Chinese history The New Yorker

Shuang Xuetao has written seven volumes of fiction, for which he has won the Blossoms Literary Prize, the Wang Zengqi Short Story Prize, and the Blancpain-Imaginist Award for the best Chinese writer under forty-five. His short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Astra Magazine and Brick, and a collection of three novellas, Rouge Street, was published in English in 2022. His work has been adapted for both television and film. He 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 and Zhang Yueran. Most recently, his translation of Zou Jingzhi's Ninth Building was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023. He has been a translator-in-residence at Princeton University and the University of Iowa, and chaired the jury for the National Book Award in Translated Literature.

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