Vertical Motion

Two young girls sneak onto the grounds of a hospital, where they find a disturbing moment of silence in a rose garden. A couple grows a plant that blooms underground, invisibly, to their long-time neighbors consternation. A cat worries about its sleepwalking owner, who receives a mysterious visitor while hes asleep. After a ten-year absence, a young man visits his uncle, on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise that is floating in the air, while his ugly cousin hesitates on the stairs . . . Can Xue is a master of the dreamscape, crafting stories that inhabit the space where fantasy and reality, time and timelessness, the quotidian and the extraordinary, meet. The stories in this striking and lyrical new collectionpopulated by old married couples, children, cats, and nosy neighbors, the entire menagerie of the everydayreaffirm Can Xues reputation as one of the most innovative Chinese writers in a generation.