In the city of Yong’an, a fiction writer and amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of its fabled beasts. These creatures, with their greenish stomachs or gills or strange birthmarks, live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness, some with ancient forbears, others engineered as artificial breeds.Guided – and often misguided – by her elusive university professor and his scrappy sidekick-student Zhong Liang, our narrator finds herself on a mission to track down each species. And as she blunders from one implausible situation to the next, she comes one step closer to revealing her own multifaceted beastliness…Part detective story, part metaphysical enquiry, Strange Beasts of China addresses existential questions of identity, being, love and morality with whimsy and grace.
Over de auteur
Jeremy Tiang is a Singaporean writer, translator, and playwright, based in New York City. He has translated more than ten books from Chinese, including novels by Zhang Yueran, Yeng Pway Ngon and Chan Ho-Kei, and is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Grant, an NEA Literary Translation Fellowship, and a People’s Literature Prize Mao-Tai Cup for Translation. He has also translated plays by Wei Yu-Chia, Zhan Jie and Xu Nuo. He is the author of a short story collection (It Never Rains on National Day, shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize 2015) and a novel (State of Emergency, Epigram Books, 2017).