Ye Chun / 叶春

An Indie Next selection, a Lit Hub's Best Book of 2021, New York Public Library's Best Book of 2021, an Electric Lit's Favorite Short Story Collection of 2021, and longlisted for 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

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“There's not a story in Hao that's anything less than gorgeous. Ye, who's also a literary translator, has an uncanny ability to explore the vocabularies that we build around ourselves, the ways that we communicate, and what happens when those break down. It's a beautiful collection that looks at people who have nothing but their words — until they don't.” —NPR

 

“Slow, somber and often elegant, Hao thematically foregrounds language. Rather than reproducing the trite ethos of language as power, Ye shows how words operate as weapons, comforts, memories and insufficient — if sometimes beautiful — representations of intent.” —The New York Times Book Review

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“Each of Ye’s dozen stories astounds.” —Booklist (starred review)

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“These battles are fought with pens, stick figures, tender drawings on a child’s back; silent screams are in the background.” —Kirkus (starred review)

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“Lapidary, understated, unflinching and intimate, the pieces in Ye Chun’s debut short story collection Hao offer at the same time a prismatic, expansive, historical vision of the complex, often dire circumstances of a host of Chinese female characters across time and place.” —On the Seawall

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“These stories are immaculate, beautiful, tattered — like their characters.” —Vulture

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“Ye Chun’s gorgeous collection turns our attention to Chinese women. They are wives and mothers. They are immigrants and graduate students. They are bridges between continents...More than anything, Hao is a love letter to language.” —Lit Hub

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“With its gorgeous, insight-laden prose, the collection leaps across oceans and generations, cities and historical epochs. While leaping across them, though, it threads them together.” —The Rupture

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“These beautiful, profound stories are love songs to a daughter, tirades against an unjust world, and, above all, radiant meditations on Chinese history and language. Each story builds on the last with brilliance, power, and page-turning racing energy. Surely this book will be among the best story collections of the year.” —DEB OLIN UNFERTH, author of Barn 8

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“That language must be used precisely to have power feels both obvious and too often overlooked, but in Ye Chun's Hao, we're shown not only the continually precise and gorgeous renderings of words and phrases, but the power this can have to conjure specific ways of being, to argue against so many silent violences, and to feel like its own type of taking care. Each of these stories is an individual world brought to life fully by the particularity of its language, by Ye’s extraordinarily far-reaching and deeply felt imagination, combined with her consistently stunning acuity and control.” —LYNN STEGER STRONG, author of Want

 

“Ye Chun captures the complexities of human emotion with a fine chisel and poet's eye, moving deftly between themes of motherhood, loss, and migration. Hao is a richly imagined, satisfying collection, one that invites you to stay, to linger and be moved.” —TE-PING CHEN, author of Land of Big Numbers

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“Through everything the women in these stories confront—oppressive regimes, immigrant struggles, infertility, the pain of motherhood—the beauty of Ye Chun’s writing lifts them up. From loneliness and devastation, this exquisite collection fashions a tribute to human resilience and the solace of language.” —POLLY ROSENWAIKE, author of Look How Happy I’m Making You

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“Hao is an unsettling, hypnotic collection spanning centuries, in which language and children act simultaneously as tethers and casting lines, the reasons and the tools for moving forward after trauma. You’ll come away from this beautiful book changed.” —JULIA FINE, author of The Upstairs House

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“Few books capture the raw terror and exultation of motherhood, and of the implications of language itself, as gorgeously as this one. To say that Hao moved me doesn't feel like enough: I felt changed on the other side of these magnificent stories. Hao is pure triumph.” —CLARE BEAMS, author of The Illness Lesson

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Interviews in Los Angeles Review of Books, Catapult, Phoebe, PC News, & Soapberry Review

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