Before the Second World War there were sixty families – most of them Sudeten Germans – and fifty-eight houses in Sovinec, a small village in Czechoslovakia north-east of Brno. Now there are only twenty-six people living in the eight remaining habitable houses.
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‘I tried to work out how many elements I would have plugged if I retired at sixty, and soon I was fatigued before a simple subtraction.’
Fiction by A. Jiang.
‘An enormous black form rose from the water. Uncle Feng told me in a low voice to run fast.’
Fiction by Can Xue, translated by Annelise Finegan.
‘At a time when China has become a unifying specter of menace for Western governments, this issue of Granta brings the country’s literary culture into focus.’
The editor introduces the issue.
‘Fiction is a kind of spell, I said, and analysing a story is an exorcism. It loses all its mystery.’
Fiction by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang.
‘Lu Dong is a fifth-rate actor – that’s by his own ranking system.’
Fiction by Shuang Xuetao, translated by Jeremy Tiang.
Here, more die than are born. There’s a refrigerator at the bottom of the lake. The ferryman is dead. No one is coming to take his place.
