Monkey in Residence & Other Speculations

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/

Author Bio

Presented By:

XU XI 許素細 has authored or edited nineteen books, most recently This Fish Is Fowl (Nebraska 2019) and The Art and Craft of Asian Stories (Bloomsbury, 2021). An Indonesian-Chinese native of Hong Kong, she has long split her life between New York and Hong Kong. A diehard transnational, she is also founder of Authors at Large and the Mongrel Writers Residence. She currently occupies the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Follow her @xuxiwriter on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.