ELSEWHERE

“Elsewhere” is a fitting description of this literary buffet of a short story collection.

These tales are set across multiple countries and centuries. To give an idea of the range on display, the collection’s two best stories follow a woman falling in love with the Facebook page of a recently deceased stranger and a political plot among the disciples of Confucius. Even more impressively, Yan writes across styles to best serve each story. “Stockholm,” a story about a literary conference, borrows from the blunt confessionalism of autofiction; meanwhile, the protagonist of “Free Wandering,” a story about being overwhelmed by New York, is a direct descendant of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. This book is Yan’s first to be written in English, and language is a major theme throughout. At a meeting of the Foreign Movies No Subtitles group in “How I Fell in Love With the Well-Documented Life of Alex Whelan,” members debate the plot of a movie in a language they don’t understand. In "Mother Tongue," a couple of Chinese poets commit to surrounding their new baby only with English. But at 6 months old, the baby can speak only nonsense words, and it’s unclear if the experiment is working: “It was impossible to tell if they were Chinese or English, prose or verse.” Language is a source of alienation, a way for characters to be told they don’t belong. But it can also lead to new possibilities as characters find inspiration in misreadings. An Irish man with a Chinese character tattooed on his bicep believes the character reads home. In fact, it reads grave, and though it wouldn’t be difficult to fix, he decides to keep the tattoo as it is: “ ‘Grave’ is grand,” he declares. In an interview, Yan said that she relies on the distance of English, her second language, to talk about her mother’s death. In fact, a few of these stories touch on maternal mortality, a signal that the book’s themes of communication are deeply personal.

A bold, confident book that delights in written language even as it probes it.