Ursula K. Le Guin recommends Wu Ming-Yi's THE MAN WITH THE COMPOUND EYES

Everyone on the Grayhawk team was very excited to receive a rare blurb from none other than SF giant Ursula K. Le Guin for Wu Ming-Yi's upcoming novel, The Man with the Compound Eyes. 

UK cover by Joe Wilson

CC Image courtesy of TheNerdPatrol

       

Here it is:

"We haven't read anything like this novel. Ever.

South America gave us magical realism – what is Taiwan giving us? A new way of telling our new reality, beautiful, entertaining, frightening, preposterous, true. Completely unsentimental but never brutal, Wu Ming-Yi treats human vulnerability and the world's vulnerability with fearless tenderness."

Quite a recommendation! And we're not the only ones to think so. After Gray shared his Chinese translation of the blurb yesterday, the Taiwanese edition jumped back into the best seller chart at no 25 on Taiwan's biggest online book shop, books.com.tw! The Man with the Compound Eyes is well on its way to becoming a Taiwanese contemporary classic.

The UK edition comes out at the end of August by Harvill Secker, and Pantheon will publish in the US and Canada next spring. The French edition will be hitting the shops January 2014, courtesy of Editions Stock. Can't wait until then? Why not read an extract of Darryl Sterk's beautiful English translation (and hear the author read the extract in Chinese) as published earlier this year in Asymptote.