Friday, March 24, 2023 | 6pm to 7:30pm
25 West 43rd Street, Room 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan
Observations of contemporary life that make monkeys of us: this existential disbelief thrums through speculative stories and essays in writer Xu Xi’s latest collection, Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations. 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.
Keenly observed, richly textured, and often slyly humorous, Xu’s aptly named speculations create space for childhood recollections of a vanishing Hong Kong to shimmer alongside her characters’ lucidly imagined inner landscapes and her own surreal dispatches from the ever-shifting present. In these fluidly multilingual accounts of displacement and discovery, Xu deftly blurs the lines between memoir, photojournalism, fiction, and satire to invite readers to consider “the many different ways of being” – and to wonder about their own place in it all. ~ Inez Tan, This Is Where I Won’t Be Alone
Reviews/Conversations
Michigan Quarterly | Tupelo Quarterly
Purchase Book: https://signal8press.com/monkey-in-residence/
