Further News of Defeat

THE BOOK: Further News of Defeat: Stories.

PUBLISHED IN: September 2020

THE AUTHOR: Michael X. Wang.

THE EDITOR: Shelby Newsom.

THE PUBLISHER: Autumn House Press, a nonprofit, literary publisher based in Pittsburg, PA. They publish full-length collections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

SUMMARY: Steeped in a long history of violence and suffering, Michael X. Wang’s debut collection of short stories interrogates personal and political events set against the backdrop of China that are both real and perceived, imagined and speculative. Wang plunges us into the fictional Chinese village of Xinchun and beyond to explore themes of tradition, family, modernity, and immigration in a country grappling with its modern identity. Further News of Defeat is rich with characters who have known struggle and defeat and who find themselves locked in pivotal moments of Chinese history—such as World War II and the Tiananmen Square massacre—as they face losses of the highest order and still find cause for revival.

THE BACK STORY: Most of the characters in the stories are related, in some way, to Xinchun, which is loosely based on my father’s village. The incidents of the title story were based on a real event in which Japanese soldiers threw villagers down a well and forced them to work in coal mines. “A Minor Revolution” was based on my own experiences: I was six and living in Beijing when Tiananmen Square happened, and many of the details I included came from the stories my mother told me. So, in a way, you can say that these stories are “exotic” or localized to events that happened in China.

The final two stories, “At This Moment, In This Space” and “New Work in New China,” are speculative in nature. The former deals with a father who immigrated to the United States and lost everything; the only thing that remains—his eldest son—is out of reach as well, and the father would rather ponder other dimensions than grasp for understanding. The latter describes a world in which China has regressed back to its imperial roots—which, in my opinion, is a likely outcome given the lack of attention to human rights by the government and the (relative) indifference by its citizens, who have suffered through decades of starvation and revolutions and are only recently seeing a better life.

Still, despite being centered around China, I also like to think of Further News of Defeat as a collection that transcends time and place and deals with relatable issues like family and the agency of individuals. Many of the stories describe how traumatic events shape citizens who find themselves in places and situations without a choice of their own, and how families recover from (or deteriorate under) the strains of a country searching for its modern identity.

WHY THIS TITLE? “Further News of Defeat” is the name of the title story in the collection, but I think it extends to the rest of the book as well. All these pieces deal with defeat in some way: the breakdown of families, the lasting impact of military failures, the ramifications for the future of China if the current climate of political abuse continues.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? I think Further News of Defeat sees China through a different lens than most other Chinese American books, which predominantly describe the country through an urban vantage point (think Crazy Rich Asians or even Joy Luck Club), but it’s often forgotten that about 40% of the population is rural, and this doesn’t account for migrant workers who travel back and forth from the countryside to the city annually, and the Chinese government likely skews the figures to make the country seem more developed. Most of my protagonists come from this neglected rural demographic, and it’s very important to me that their stories are told.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“Wang’s stories travel from the countryside to the city and back, from China to America, though time and space thrillingly; they are hilarious and tragic, political and domestic, beautiful and brutal, not in turn but miraculously at the same time. On every page technically nervy and beautifully written and startling—in language, character, telling detail—Further News of Defeat is intensely interested in the questions and sorrows and strange jokes of being a human being in the world.” — Judges’ Citation ― 2021 PEN America /Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection-Winner

“This collection demonstrates an extraordinary range: real and fantastic, urban and rural, young and old, past and present. The stories move with measured and unflinching prose. . . . The disparate narrators show Wang’s extraordinary capacity to empathize with different people. Wang is thorough in imagining the thoughts of his characters, especially when their thoughts are questionable or when they’re not behaving well. The authorial distance seems quite an accomplishment in a writer’s first work. The stories are literary, but written as if told and not written. At its intersection, Wang delivers stories of remarkable symmetry. This is a collection full of devastating loss, yet resonant light cracking against the long night.” — Judges’ Citation ― Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Writers Award

“In Further News of Defeat, Wang reveals a remarkable ability to move fluidly through time periods and points of view, all with such a clear and vibrant voice—the stories then sing on a sentence level while also illuminating the world at large. There’s big ambition here, but shown through these small moments and stylistic flourishes, and the combination is both graceful and exciting, a tumbling between micro and macro, between individual and society, scene and era.” — Aimee Bender, author of “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake”

“Michael X. Wang’s collection of stories, Further News of Defeat, focuses intensely on the people of China, in their home country and in their diaspora, but make no mistake about this splendid book. It is about all of us. His stories brilliantly explore the deepest theme inherent in every human being and in most great literature: our yearning for a self, for an identity, for a place in the universe. This is a remarkable debut by a gifted new artist.” — Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

AUTHOR PROFILE: Michael X. Wang was born in Fenyang, a coal-mining city in China’s mountainous Shanxi Province. He immigrated to the United States when he was six. He holds a PhD in Literature from Florida State University and an MFA in Fiction from Purdue. Further News of Defeat is his first book. It won the 2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and the 2022 Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award. It was also a finalist for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) Firecracker Award. His debut novel, Lost in the Long March, comes out this year from The Overlook Press.

He’s a huge fan of Kazuo Ishiguro, Charles Yu, Anton Chekhov, and Aimee Bender. He can be sort of an eclectic writer. At the moment, he’s working on a number of other projects, including a new novel tentatively titled The Red Synthetic Utopia of the Mind, which is a genre-bending science-fiction novel that explores the themes of consciousness, immigration, environmentalism, and video game culture.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: There’s a tendency, I feel, for people to reduce the complexities of another country to a couple commonly known events or associations. For example, Western readers are familiar with the atrocities and human rights violations often associated with the Cultural Revolution, but if they don’t have the historical or cultural context surrounding it, they would never fully understand what was going on and what led to it. It’s kind of like if someone in China only read about the Ku Klux Klan and all the horrific things that it did and knew nothing else about American history. It would color that person’s perception of America. They would think: Wow, what a horrible country! How can any nation in the world let something like that happen? How can any country allow such an organization to exist? The same is true for the Cultural Revolution, except the scale is much greater. Your average Western reader learns about that part of Chinese history and instantly make the connection that China is a backwards and barbaric country—perhaps they even feel lucky to be born in the West—yet they know next to nothing about what happened before and after the event. Of course, it’s crucial to bring events like the Cultural Revolution to light, but they also shouldn’t be what defines a country either. With Further News of Defeat, I hope readers take away a fuller perspective of China, its history, and the complexities of its culture.

SAMPLE: You can find a sample of the first story here: https://www.amazon.com/Further-News-Defeat-Michael-Wang/dp/1938769643.

LOCAL OUTLETS: If you’re in Russellville, Arkansas, you can purchase it from Dogear Books.

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Most likely buying from the web will be your best option. I highly suggest you directly order it from the Autumn House Press website (https://www.autumnhouse.org/books/further-news-of-defeat/), but you can also purchase it from Abe’s Book Store, Barnes & Nobles, and of course, Amazon.

PRICE: $17.95.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: You can contact me directly at mw1010k@gmail.com, or send me a PM through twitter @MichaelXWang3.