Elsewhere: 'Wonderful writing' Sarah Hall

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The stories in “Elsewhere” also have a visceral quality. Characters often find themselves in states of discomfort, with instances of vomiting and references to eating meat taking on a horrifying resonance. This adds intensity to the stories, immersing readers in the physical and emotional experiences of the characters. Moving between the contemporary and the historical, the frighteningly dystopian to the hyper-real, Yan Ge’s English-language debut is a mastery of the short story form. A prolific writer in her native China, Ge has won the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Prize and was named by People’s Literature magazine as one of 20 future literature masters in China.

He turned around to the table next to us and shouted, “Small Bamboo! Can you talk some sense into this girl★” Yan Ge applies her trademark stylistic prowess to bitesize stories, which follow protagonists as they navigate the sense of otherness with varying degrees of success. Pour a crisp glass of something and settle in for a ride, it’ll be time well spent." — Rolling Stone Yan Ge was born Dai Yuexing in 1984 in Sichuan, China. She began publishing in 1994. She completed a PhD in comparative literature at Sichuan University and is the Chair of the China Young Writers Association. Her writing uses a lot of Sichuanese, rather than Standard Chinese (Mandarin).[1] People’s Literature (Renmin Wenxue 人民文学) magazine recently chose her – in a list reminiscent of The New Yorker's ‘20 under 40’ – as one of China's twenty future literary masters. In 2012 she was chosen as Best New Writer by the prestigious Chinese Literature Media Prize (华语文学传媒大奖 最佳新人奖). Yan Ge (Chinese: 颜歌; born 1984) is the pen name of Chinese writer Dai Yuexing (戴月行). After they left the table, I took out my book and began to read. The TV was on in the next room, and Sister Du and the waitresses were watching the news, weeping. Jangly and eclectic... These stories map out the distance between the head and the gut —the way language can fail to convey the deepest, most visceral facts of life." — The Guardian

A recommended read if you are into something that is stimulating, provocative, intriguing and “meaty” (no pun intended, but you would understand especially if you would have read the last story in this compilation 😅).

Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. The seventh, "How I Fell In Love With...", is a story of a 27yo Chinese-born woman living in Ireland, struggling to reconcile her life with herself, and starting to obsess with a young man she met briefly, just before he passes away. The story could he interesting, as far as it touches upon the issues of what is a person and how much of it can one learn from social media. However, the overlay of self wallowing victimhood expressed by the protagonist just leaves a bad aftertaste, making the story difficult to like. Elsewhere” is a compilation of nine stories ranging from varied perspectives. You would find a group of writers discussing poetry in the midst of a natural disaster, to a woman who sort of fell in love with a guy through Facebook after he was dead, to a man’s journey to the ‘other side’ and perhaps a period drama involving Confucius?

In this Spotlight:

The sixth, "No Time To Write", is a story of an Irish woman who grew up, among other places, in Shanghai, and has had a complicated relationship with her parents and herself. Lots of self pity and victimhood here. The whole story feels like a rant by an infantile young adult. As a result of this cosmopolitanism, the stories in Elsewhere are jangly and eclectic, set in wildly different time periods and filled with dissonances. That shit-and-literature theme recurs, in various incarnations, throughout. Elsewhere’s characters seem constantly in abdominal discomfort; someone vomits in five of the nine stories. The act of eating meat takes on a horrifying resonance, in part because characters in two separate stories are presented with dishes made from human flesh. What’s consistent…is an abiding sense of lightness, even when the characters are melancholy or lost….The pleasure of traveling ‘elsewhere,’ as in reading this singular book, is in wandering.” — Wall Street Journal Yan Ge was born Dai Yuexing in 1984 in Sichuan, China. She began publishing in 1994. She completed a PhD in comparative literature at Sichuan University and is the Chair of the China Young Writers Association. Her writing uses a lot of Sichuanese, rather than Standard Chinese (Mandarin). People’s Literature (Renmin Wenxue 人民文学) magazine recently chose her–in a list reminiscent of The New Yorker’s ‘20 under 40’ – as one of China’s twenty future literary masters. In 2012 she was chosen as Best New Writer by the prestigious Chinese Literature Media Prize (华语文学传媒大奖 最佳新人奖). But none of these matter to us,” Six Times continued. “When poets come into the room we simply chomp on the fictional dish you’ve created. We eat up the food and shit it out later. And the shit is poetry.”