Rouge Street #

Shuang Xuetao #

November 26, 2024

5/5

Rouge Street is an incredible set of short stories. Every story is imbued with an immense sense of noir and it truly pulls you and pushes you furthe and further through the story. Each are fascinating and each are incredibly imaginative. You can tell when a master is at work becauase their work seems easy, it seems fluid, and sometimes it even gives you that “I should’ve thought of this!” feeling. Shuang Xuetao’s stories have this.

This prose is beautiful, the translation is incredible, I need to read it in the original Chinese. Maybe one day.

In some way each story feels like it was written in a very different order from the way we experience it. Perhaps backwards. It seems like Shuang Xuetao himself was solving each story as he wrote them.