A New York Magazine's Vulture Best Book of 2025 A provincial ambulance drives through the night in search of a hospital, a fifth-rate actor goes method as a hitman on a sweltering rooftop, a legendary knife fighter is found working on the factory floor of a northern village. Hunter's stories of deceptive, brutal realism play with myth and history, offering a vision of ordinary life in China with a magic realist turn. Filled with dark humor and written with a tinge of noir, these fictions grapple with the realities of contemporary China, and show why Shuang Xuetao is the most highly-celebrated young writer working in the country today. Granta Magazine Editions is a paperback original series of exceptional literary voices published by Granta magazine. "One of China's most celebrated young authors . . . he has been hailed for bringing attention to a time and people that China's public imagination had long written off." - New York Times " Shuang Xuetao offers an unsparing portrait of life in China's industrial north-east. The Dongbei renaissance draws attention to places left behind by the nation's rise but also points to demand for honest, nuanced accounts of the real China." - The Economist "In sparse, vernacular prose, Shuang uses fabulist noir to evoke the pace of social change . . . Shuang's multi-voiced narratives both challenge and confirm that maxim, conveying the contested legacies of recent Chinese history." - The New Yorker Shuang Xuetao was born in 1983 in Shenyang. Shuang has written six volumes of fiction, for which he has won the Blossoms Literary Prize, the Wang Zengqi Short Story Prize, and the Blancpain-Imaginist Award for best Chinese writer under forty-five. His short fiction has appeared in the New Yorker , Astra Magazine and Brick , and a novella collection, Rouge Street , was published in English in 2022. His short stories and novellas have seen major adaptations for television and film. Jeremy Tiang is a novelist, playwright and literary translator. He has translated over thirty books from across the Chinese-speaking world, including novels by Yeng Pway Ngon, Yan Ge, Lo Yi-Chin, Liu Xinwu and Zhang Yueran. Most recently, his translation of Zou Jingzhi's Ninth Building was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023. He has been a translator-in-residence at Princeton University and the University of Iowa, and chaired the jury for the National Book Award in Translated Literature.