Rouge Street gives voice to an intriguing cast of characters left behind by China's economic miracle . . . . Shuang pulls no punches . . . . From start to finish, his scope is close to the ground, his language sparingly emotive and unobtrusive. -Jing Tsu, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) Introduced by Madeleine Thien, author of the Booker finalist novel Do Not Say We Have NothingFrom one of the most highly celebrated young Chinese writers, three dazzling novellas of Northeast China, mixing realism, mysticism, and noir. An inventor dreams of escaping his drab surroundings in a flying machine. A criminal, trapped beneath a frozen lake, fights a giant fish. A strange girl pledges to ignite a field of sorghum stalks. Rouge Street presents three novellas by Shuang Xuetao, the lauded young Chinese writer whose frank, fantastical short fiction has already inspired comparisons to Ernest Hemingway and Haruki Murakami. Located in China's frigid Northeast, Shenyang, the author's birthplace, boasts an illustrious past-legend holds that the emperor's makeup was manufactured here. But while the city enjoyed renewed importance as an industrial hub under Mao Zedong, China's subsequent transition from communism to a market economy led to an array of social ills-unemployment, poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorce, suicide.