Product Description The most ambitious work of fiction by a writer widely considered the most important novelist working in China today. In this darkly comic novel, a group of women inhabits a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and false reports fly. Conspiracies abound in a community that normalizes paranoia and suspicion. Some try to flee-whether to a mysterious gambling bordello or to ancestral homes that can be reached only underground through muddy caves, sewers, and tunnels. Others seek out the refuge of Nest County, where traditional Chinese herbal medicines can reshape or psychologically transport the self. Each life is circumscribed by buried secrets and transcendent delusions. Can Xue's masterful love stories for the new millennium trace love's many guises-satirical, tragic, transient, lasting, nebulous, and fulfilling-against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of commerce and industry, fraud and exploitation, and sex and romance drawn from the East and the West. About the Author Can Xue is the pseudonym of the new experimental author Deng Xiaohua, born in 1953. Formerly a tailor, she began writing fiction in 1983. Janet Song is the recipient of multiple Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine and was named one of their Best Voices of 2008. She was once cast in a feature film because the producer happened to be listening to an audiobook she narrated and just fell in love with her voice. Janet lives in Los Angeles. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen is academic director and clinical assistant professor of translation at NYU School of Professional Studies. Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, and art journalist living in New York City and Marfa, Texas.