Mother River, Can Xue
Mother River, Can Xue
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Mother River

Author: Can Xue, Karen Gernant, Chen Zeping

Narrator: Tim Lounibos, Rachel Yong

Unabridged: 8 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 04/22/2025


Synopsis

Winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award

In Mother River, Can Xue, one of China's most daring and visionary writers, invites us into a surreal landscape where reality is as fluid as a river itself. This collection of thirteen stories weaves together vivid, dreamlike narratives that challenge our perceptions of time, identity, and existence.

Through her signature blend of the absurd and the profound, Can Xue explores the fragile boundaries between the known and unknown, between humanity and nature. In these tales, a man tries to chase down an elusive golden peacock, a woman communicates with mysterious, shifting forms of light, and the river that runs through a small village seems to pulse with memories of its own.

Surreal, provocative, and unique, Mother River reinforces Can Xue's status as one of the most rewarding and complex writers working today—and a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize.

About Can Xue

Can Xue is the pseudonym of the new experimental author Deng Xiaohua, born in 1953. Formerly a tailor, she began writing fiction in 1983.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Noe on March 18, 2025

Anxiety inducing… often difficult to follow… and also contains so many beautiful images and touching depictions of dynamics between family/community members. I can’t wait to read more of her work. “‘Is your sweetheart here?’ I asked Ji. ‘She’s everywhere, but never where I am.’” (Is that how you use q......more

Goodreads review by Matthew on March 14, 2025

Can Xue is a trickster. Her stories begin simply. A boy and a river. Retired schoolteachers living in a retirement community. A young man frustrated with his family. But then something strange happens. A mysterious shadow appears. Each person in a couple suspects that the other is keeping a secret.......more

Goodreads review by Jessica on March 08, 2025

Stories like dreams... The pull of the natural world even when modernity rules, the urge to merge with that world... I found the first six stories much more powerful than those of the book's second half. The best of these stories are deeply mysterious and may merge with your own dream world.........more

Goodreads review by mingorae on March 23, 2025

i really wanted to like this book but i found myself not connecting with it as much as i hoped 🙁 the first few stories i did enjoy but found it harder to decipher as i went through the book. i fear the ambiguity is not for my little brain to comprehend. however, the imagery in this book was really b......more

Goodreads review by W.S. on February 01, 2025

The best parts of this short story collection—magical-realist vignettes about a farm where stones grow out of the soil or a hidden forest in a city—remind me of Calvino's Invisible Cities in their ability to make you nostalgic for gently fantastical worlds you've never visited. Many of these stories......more