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Tuesday, September 27, 2016 Exhibit X Fiction Reading: Can Xue Timelines: 1b: Past Events (Unseen Archive), 2: Exhibit X Fiction Series

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can xue

Where:
Center for the Performing Arts, Screening Room
SUNY Buffalo, North Campus
Amherst, NY 14260
Date: October 10, 2016
Time: 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.

Can Xue—whose pseudonym in Chinese means both the dirty snow that refuses to melt and the purest snow at the top of a high mountain—was born in 1953 in Changsha City, Hunan Province, in South China. She lived in Changsha until 2001, when she and her husband moved to Beijing. In 1957, her father, an editorial director at the New Hunan Daily News, was condemned as an Ultra-Rightist and was sent to reform through labor, and her mother, who worked at the same newspaper, was sent to the countryside for labor as well. Because of the family catastrophe during the Cultural Revolution, Can Xue lost her chance for further education and only graduated from elementary school. Largely self-taught, Can Xue has studied reading and writing in English for years, and she has read extensively English texts of literature.

Regarded as one of the most experimental writers in the world by some literary scholars and readers—Susan Sontag once reflected, “If China has one possibility of a Nobel laureate it is Can Xue”—Can Xue describes her works as “soul literature” or “life literature.” She is the author of numerous short-story collections and four novels. Six of her works have been published in English, including Dialogues in Paradise (Northwestern University Press, 1989), Old Floating Cloud: Two Novelllas (Northwestern University Press, 1991), The Embroidered Shoes (Henry Holt, 1997), Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories (New Directions, 2006), Five Spice Street (Yale University Press, 2009). Vertical Motion (2011) and most recently, Frontier (2016) have been translated into English by University at Rochester’s Open Letter Press. A novel and a commentary book on Kafka are forthcoming from Yale University Press. She has also published books of commentary on Borges, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Italo Calvino, and Bruno Schulz. She claims that all of her works are from the experiments in which she takes herself as the subject.

An extensive website devoted to Can Xue’s work can be found at the MIT website: http://web.mit.edu/ccw/can-xue/index.shtml