ELSEWHERE

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.