The Embroidered Shoes: Stories

These stories, written between 1986 and 1994, 10 years after the death of Mao--and during and following 1989's Tiananmen Square massacre--are suffused with the tone of that bizarre and radical time. Can Xue is no stranger to controversy; she's considered one of the most radical fiction writers in contemporary China. These stories vary in length and style--some are dark and creepy, reminiscent of ghost stories; others are surreal, and a few seem to parody the formal rhetoric of the Communist state. Each one, however, boasts lots of action riddled with unpredictable twists.