Mending Bodies | 韓麗珠 Hon Lai Chu, Jacqueline Leung
Mending Bodies | 韓麗珠 Hon Lai Chu, Jacqueline Leung
Couldn't load pickup availability
Share
What If Loving Someone Meant Giving Up Your Own Body?
English PEN Presents Award
ALTA First Translation Prize Shortlist
National Translation Award in Prose Longlist
In a failing city, a government program incentivizes couples to “conjoin”—surgically attach themselves to one another—promising a flourishing economy, ecological revitalization, and personal fulfillment. A student writing her dissertation on the program’s history begins to suffer from insomnia. As her world unravels and under the weight of expectations by both society and her close friends, she worries that maybe they are all right when they tell her it would be better—for the good of another person and for the good of the country—to sacrifice everything that she is and get conjoined. Mending Bodies blends body horror and political allegory to explore a world where even the motives of those you love most are shaped by larger forces.
.
Editorial Reviews
"An unsettling fable about an extreme form of cohabitation. . . . Hon’s turns of phrase are consistently arresting (“The self proliferates as incessantly as mold”). This intelligent speculative work is eerily transfixing." —Publishers Weekly
“Not at all what I was expecting. Raises some interesting questions about personal freedom, bodily autonomy, and identity, in the format - not of a dystopia - but of an alternate reality that hits disturbingly close to home. An early favorite for 2025!” —Tony Paese, Books & Company
"Strange dreams and complex metaphors combine to create a dazzling, hallucinatory portrait of societal alienation."—Charlie Marks, Fountain Books
Praise for The Kite Family
“Evocatively written and expertly translated, these Hong Kong stories will draw you into Hon Lai-chu’s surreal and yet recognizable world.”—Howard Goldblatt, translator of Nobel laureate Mo Yan
About the Author
韓麗珠 Hon Lai Chu is one of Hong Kong's most prominent writers and the author of several novels, including Mending Bodies, Degravitation Zone, and A Dictionary of Two Cities, co-authored with Dorothy Tse, which won the Hong Kong Book Prize. Her most recent works are Half-Eclipse and Darkness under the Sun, two diaristic essay collections about Hong Kong. She has also received accolades from Taiwan's Unitas Literary Association, the Liang Shiu-chiu Literature Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, and the Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature, among many others.
Jacqueline Leung is a writer and translator from Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in Wasafiri, Transtext(e)s Transcultures, Gulf Coast, Asymptote, Nashville Review, SAND Journal, the Asian Review of Books, Books From Taiwan, and elsewhere. She is a translator editor at The Offing. Her excerpt of Mending Bodies is a winner of PEN Presents by the English PEN. This is her first full-length translation.
Product details
-
Publication
Two Lines Press
-
Author
-
Language
English
Lexile:
-
Pages
209
-
ISBN-13
9781949641769