Elsewhere: Stories

Longlisted for THE STORY PRIZE | A New Yorker BEST BOOK of 2023 | MOST ANTICIPATED by Nylon • Rolling Stone • The Millions

From multi-award-winning author Yan Ge, a shimmering, genre-bending English-language debut that announces the next phase in a major literary career.

“As haunting, dreamlike, and addictive as a melatonin-induced slumber.” —Nylon

“Deft... Elsewhere [explores] the power of language across the Chinese diaspora to either bring people together or push them apart.”—The New York Times

In twenty years, Yan Ge has authored thirteen books written in Chinese, working across an impressive range of genres and subjects. Now, Yan Ge transposes her dynamic storytelling onto another linguistic landscape. The result is a collection humming with her trademark wit and style—and with the electricity of a seasoned artist flexing her virtuosity with a new medium.

A young woman bonds with an encampment of poets after a devastating earthquake. Against her better judgment, a college student begins to fall for an acquaintance who might be dead. And a Confucian disciple returns to the Master bearing a jar full of grisly remains. Weaving between reality and dreamy surreality, these nine stories wend toward elsewhere, a comforting, frustrating, just-out-of-reach place familiar to anyone who has ever experienced longing. Through it all Yan Ge’s protagonists peer thoughtfully at their own feelings of displacement—physical or emotional, the result of travel, emigration, or exile. Brilliant and irresistibly readable, Elsewhere explores the utility (or not) of art in the face of lonesomeness, quotidian, and spectacular.

This highly anticipated collection is further proof that Yan Ge is a generational literary talent, to be watched closely for decades to come.

Yan Ge was born in Sichuan, China in 1984. She is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English, and is the author of fourteen books in Chinese, including six novels. She has received numerous awards and was named by People’s Literature magazine as one of twenty future literature masters in China. Her work has been translated into twelve languages, including English, French, and German. The latest English translation of her novel, Strange Beasts of China, was one of the New York Times Notable Books of 2021. She was on the judging panel of the International Dublin Literary Award 2019. In 2021, she was on the final selection panel for the Laureate for Irish Fiction. Yan’s English writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Irish Times, TLS, Granta, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia where she was the recipient of the UEA International Award 2018/19. She was a MacDowell fellow in 2022. Her English language debut short story collection Elsewhere was published in 2023 and was one of the New Yorker Best Books of the Year. Yan lives in Norwich.