A 2024 issue of the literary magazine Granta devoted to mainland Chinese writing which quickly repaid my decision to buy it. I liked most of the stories pretty well and found some great; and if you're like me and have no prior acquaintance with modern Chinese lit, this collection also invites you to play amateur sociologist or State Dept. analyst and try to patch together a tentative understanding of how contemporary Chinese writing differs from Anglo writing.

On that point, two pieces—the editor Thomas Meaney's introduction and an interview with the editor and journalist Wu Qi—are useful orientation, alerting the reader to such useful context as, for instance, the phenomenon of the Dongbei Renaissance, Dongbei being a region playing a similar economic/cultural role as our own Rust Belt, which in recent years has produced writers who specialize in grinding (un)employment and anomie in bleak urban landscapes.

In fact, many of these stories dramatize diminished expectations and desperation in various contexts, whether it's citizens of Dongbei, the massive contingent of internal "migrant workers" from the countryside to the city, or rural townsfolk, ratifying Meaney's contention that "losers" are "the heart of Chinese literature." I usually dislike straight literary realism, but some of the events that crop up here—four men vying to take the blame for an accidental manslaughter to procure the mayor's favour, an electrical accident that burns all the people in a trolley alive, the writer Xiao Hai's non-fiction account of his decades of degrading factory work—demonstrate how it can still be refreshing and exhilarating.

Not all the stories are realist and/or depressing, nor are they always best read through a narrow national lens. The first one, for instance, is very much in dialogue with Bolaño; another is a series of wonderfully surreal vignettes about horned-up young adults during the Cultural Revolution. My favourite, "Goodbye, Bridge of the East," is funny-sad more than anything. It's about a thirty-something loser living with his parents hanging out with a female "influencer" friend who's also in her thirties, also living with her parents, and gets single-digit likes on all her posts #relatable #follow4follow