The Latest
Xu's latest collection Monkey in Residence and Other Speculations will be released November 1, 2022 by Signal 8 Press, UK.
About this book
Observations of contemporary life that make monkeys of us: this existential disbelief thrums through speculative stories and essays in Xu Xi's latest collection. These 16 short pieces, evenly divided between fiction and nonfiction, are in turn elegiac, satiric, darkly comic, lyrical, even confessional in tone, and traverse the inequities and abuse of power in sex, politics, race, history, culture, and language across a disquieting transnational terrain. Prepare to be disturbed, enlightened, and maybe even entertained.
Praise for this forthcoming work:
Read this marvellous collection by Xu Xi, genre-defying essays and fiction that are truly writing without borders. Xu Xi writes from the perspective of her global life. Her literary references range across Hesiod and Ding Ling and Jonathan Swift. The elegance of her language is breath-taking. Fallen books are "an avalanche of words" and memory is "the crookedest path." But beyond her inventiveness (I love the "end note") and erudition, Xu Xi's writing takes us into heartrending and complex longing for the spaces created by borders, especially for those we love and for the city in which her cosmopolitan being was nurtured, Hong Kong. I couldn't put this book down, and when I was finished I started to read it again.
Kim Echlin, Canadian novelist, Toronto Book Award winner. author of Speak Silence, Under the Visible Life, The Disappeared
To know Hong Kong—or even to be curious about the city and its people—is to love Xu Xi's work. Monkey in Residence is a brilliant blend of fact and fiction that captures the conundrum that is modern Hong Kong: once British, now Chinese, still seeking its own identity and freedom. The diverse pieces in this collection—some dark, some funny, some poignant—paint a portrait of a writer who has had a long love affair with a city, despite its imperfections, and knows she will never quite be able to leave it behind. Xu Xi's tantalizing language, sprinkled with Chinese, is an absolute delight to read. Clifford Garstang, author of What the Zhang Boys Know and The Shaman of Turtle Valley
Xu's new work "Fiction Remix," an excerpt from her memoir-in-progress The Work Book, appears in the latest issue of New England Review (Vol 43.1)
A new essay from Xu Xi reflecting on Hong Kong today "永久性香港 Forever This Hong Kong" at First Person with Michael Judge
New Work & More
NOW AVAILABLE - The Art and Craft of Asian Stories: A Writer's Guide and Anthology by Robin Hemley & Xu Xi
Xu's essay "Where the World Unwrapped 拆開世界" appears in Looking Back at Hong Kong: An Anthology of Writing & Art ed. Nicolette Wong
Teaching Creative Writing in Asia, ed. Darryl Whetter includes Xu's essay ”Compromised Tongues: That Wrong Language for the Creative Writing We Teach in Asia”
A recent issue of West Trestle Review republishes Xu's 2001 story “Democracy,” one that is surprisingly prescient for the state of democracy in the world today.
Xu's essay ”But for the Grace” appeared in Don't Look Now: Things We Wish We Hadn't Seen edited by Kristen Iversen and David Lazar. Mad Creek, 21st C Essays Series, 2020.
Other Happenings
A few nice things happened despite this pandemic, including a "soft launch" of Xu's newest venture - the Mongrel Writers Residence™ - a virtual residence week from August 3 to 9, featuring seven Hong Kong based writers and six writers from around the world from the MFA programs Xu directed/co-directs. Co-hosted by Cha: An Asian Literary Journal with publisher/editor Tammy Ho Lai-Ming. Here's a link to the recordings of these sessions.
September 9: Worldwide Reading for the Democracy Movement in Hong Kong by Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin 2020 & Cha: An Asian Literary Journal PEN Hong Kong.
Read Xu on the recent Hong Kong protests in her essay that treks backwards in time to reflect on history through private, personal moments. Massachusetts Review, Winter 2019. Nominated for a Pushcart.
from the reviews
"A whirlwind, wise introduction to the complicated joys of multiculturalism, This Fish Is Fowl is intensely personal yet fully engaged with the world, celebrating our differences as well as our shared universal experiences."—Foreword Reviews, starred
"Broad-ranging, introspective, and honest essays that reveal a fine writer's experiences, mind, and heart."—Kirkus
praise from other writers
"There is absolutely no one like Xu Xi. To read these smart, inventive, and always surprising essays is to be given a passport to a transnational perspective the world sorely needs at this moment. Xu Xi's sense of identity: Indonesian/Chinese/American/Hong Kong is not mixed up (though she likes to label herself a 'mongrel'), but expansive. Identity for her has almost nothing to do with borders but with a kind of echolocation—sending forth her speculations on what it means to be a traveler, a daughter, a life partner, a woman in order to determine a shifting but remarkable path through geographies of being."—Robin Hemley
"In an age of willful ignorance, parochialism, and a dominant prose style typified by misspelled tweets, Xu Xi's writing is smart, international, and fluid. She navigates smoothly between not only countries and continents but, perhaps hardest of all, family members. Here the personal isn't just political; it's global. And, most important, deeply compassionate."—Sue William Silverman
"This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being explores the life of one whose shredded passport is never large enough to hold it all. Woven into skillful family story are topics ranging from the status of Dreamers in the U.S. to the 'crying city' of Hong Kong after the Occupy Movement, all dancing around the question of what it means to belong. With so many countries gripped by a new and brutal nationalism, Xu Xi reminds us there is another side—a world lived by many between a blur of borders. Part breezy, leaping memoir, part social commentary, this book adds a crucial chapter to the old story of national identity."—Susanne Antonetta
Insignificance (2018)
From the reviews
A keen, observant chronicler of human foibles, Xu Xi's prose is as eminently readable as ever, mostly prioritising lucidity and directness but with occasional rhetorical flourishes, and her articulation of human emotional complexity instinctively feels true to life. South China Morning Post June 4, 2018
These stories will likely count for more than fictional snapshots of essential moments in Hong Kong's history, whatever the official version of that will be. Wasifiri
In the media
Xu speaks to Lily Rimmer of the UK's Glass Magazine
Dear Hong Kong (2017)
From the reviews
Xu's memoir is an unique take on the love-hate, hope-despair relationship that is so familiar to those who are from Hong Kong or have made this city their home. Zolima City Magazine Aug 7, 2017
What really opens this book to a wider audience is that it's as much about the history of Hong Kong as it is about her. And a Hong Kong that is long gone . . . For a female reader the book is a joy, told as it is by a woman who comes across as a truly free spirit. The News Lens International Aug 2, 2017
Recent Media Coverage
Special mention by editor DeWitt Henry of Xu’s piece “A Brief History of Deficit, Disquiet & Disbelief by 飛蚊 FeiMan” in the inaugural issue of Speculative Nonfiction
“2016 The Political Year” from work-in-progress Memories of You
publications & media
ALL ABOUT SKIN
Edited by Jina Ortiz & Rochelle Spencer, with a foreword by Helena Maria Viramontes, this exciting new anthology is, according to Pulitzer fiction author Junot Diaz, "electrifying and absolutely necessary." Xu Xi's work is the title story and the volume features twenty-seven stories by women of color. Published in November, 2014 by the University of Wisconsin press.
ALL ABOUT SKIN named a Ms. Magazine 2014 must-read feminist book of the year.
