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Book Title

City Like Water

Subtitle
A Novel
Author 1
Dorothy Tse; Translated from the Chinese by Natascha Bruce
Body

Your city is gone, as if sunk to the bottom of the ocean. So much has vanished with it—counterfeit watches, streets echoing with the sound of stilettos, and even some of your classmates and teachers. Your mother joins in a housewives’ protest, each woman waving the fake, bloody lotus roots they were sold until they’re turned into statues. Then it’s just you and your father at home. But soon he is absorbed into the enormous TV gifted by the government, and you can only see him in the background of soap operas. And didn’t you once have a little sister? When the police go undercover and transform your neighborhood into a violent labyrinth, where does it all leave you? Lucid, nightmarish, and indelible, City Like Water is a wondrous tale of a city not so different from your own.

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List Price
$16.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-64445-375-9
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
112
Trim Size
Trim Size
5.5 x 8.25
Keynote
A potent and disorienting new book by the author of Owlish, a National Book Critics Circle prize finalist 

About the Author

Dorothy  Tse
Dorothy Tse is a writer from Hong Kong. Her debut novel, Owlish, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and her short story collection, Snow and Shadow, was long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award. A cofounder of the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres, she has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award.
More by author
Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese. Her recent work includes Owlish by Dorothy Tse, Mystery Train by Can Xue, and Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong. After several years in Hong Kong, she now lives in Amsterdam.
More by author

Praise

  • “Gritty and fragile at the same time, City Like Water addresses a central horror of our times: the overtaking of our cities and people by the powerful. It does so without surrendering to the tamed version of reality, but by renaming the fear and reenvisioning resistance. That is exactly what poetic lucidity is supposed to do.”—Yuri Herrera, author of Season of the Swamp

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