Horizon Hong Kong

“A brilliant moving and startling collection by one of the most brilliant moving and startling writers alive. I lack the words to capture the full sweep of these uncommonly beautiful stories, the human majesty and impossible histories they encompass. If you’re going to read one book of stories this year, read Horizon Hong Kong, a collection of heartbreaks and awakenings set to lightning. A truly towering achievement.”

-Junot Díaz, author, This Is How You Lose Her and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“This is the city written aslant: anguish, desire, and cosmopolitan complexity are rendered with sparky, clever wisdom and formal inventiveness. Horizon Hong Kong offers above all a focused compassion for those who carry in their hearts the layered history of this place; the pull to stay or leave, the contest of languages, the colonial history and the complications of the handover and its aftermath.”

-Gail Jones, author, Salonika Burning and One Another

“This wonderful collection is long overdue. Xu Xi’s stories have formidable range, and with searing insight, she can recreate the isolation of being half a world from friends and family as skillfully as she expresses rage against disappearances, whether what is lost are children or sex workers or the city of Hong Kong itself. Politics from Beijing to London to New York are a constant backdrop to her characters’ lives. There is a boldness to Xu Xi’s descriptions of a particularly female experience of the world. Though she has often been called a transnational writer, she captures the universal in migration, separation, family obligations and our dreams, ambitions and disappointments all set against an ever-changing and turbulent Hong Kong.”

-Kim Echlin, author, The Disappeared

“Xu Xi portrays the cosmopolitan salad bowls of Hong Kong, America, and Europe with humor and pathos, with the subtlety, complexity, and inherent contradictions of a writer who knows her source. From the realist 1960s through present day to the speculative future, these diverse stories illuminate and challenge. They skewer shallowness and deeply move us.”

-Alison Wong, author, As the Earth Turns Silver

“Hong Kong and its unruly denizens have never burned brighter or left a deeper impression on the soul than in Xu Xi’s remarkable corpus of fiction. To read her is to step into the gaze of someone who has had her eye on the truest, the most shameful, and also the most loving and enduring parts of our inner selves; to read her is to realize you’re in the hands of one of the most beguiling storytellers our culture has ever produced.”

-Daryl Qilin Yam, author, Lovelier, Lonelier

“Whether writing fiction or essays, Xu Xi is always crossing boundaries and surprising us with her observations about displacement, hybridity, and the remarkable contradiction at the heart of her work: an unsentimental nostalgia for a lost Hong Kong, paired with a critical wonder about the rest of the world. I’m grateful to have a book that collects so much of her work under one cover.”

-Robin Hemley, author, How to Change History

“In these 22 luminous and unforgettable stories, Xu Xi deftly sets the demands of modern individuality against the obligations of memory, family, history, politics, and, most stubbornly, place-Hong Kong, a city caught between East and West, rich and poor. The results are electric. This is a collection to treasure.”

-Robert Anthony Siegel, author, Criminals

Xu Xi 許素細

Xu Xi is an Indonesian-Chinese-American writer from Hong Kong. She has authored sixteen books, including five novels, nine prose collections, one memoir, and one coauthored textbook. She has also edited four anthologies of English Hong Kong literature.

Her recent publications include:

• Monkey in Residence and Other Speculations (2022)
• This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (2019)
• Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City (2017)
• That Man in Our Lives (2016)
• The Art and Craft of Asian Stories (2021)

Xu Xi has been a writer-in-residence at Arizona State University, City University of Hong Kong, and the University of Iowa. She has also directed two international MFAs and held the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts.

In a previous career, she held management positions at The Asian Wall Street Journal, Federal Express, and Pinkerton’s. She describes herself as a diehard transnational and currently lives between New York and other locations worldwide.