172 pages
Published 2023
Read April 26
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
HOME is a neighborhood where almost every house — all but one — is susceptible to haunting, where people brawl for the mere chance to bid on a home, just to cling to the souls of their departed loved ones for a little while longer. Linghun is a novella of quiet beauty and wasting grief, in which our ghosts only manifest as much as our memories permit, and in which the living fade away and become ghostly themselves. We are haunted by grief, by homelands now remote and changed and unrecognizable, living but forgotten by those who cannot let go of the dead. It is a tremendous and sensitively wrought work, and a fantastic read.
This printing also includes two of Ai’s short stories, both of them extensions of the theme of extending one’s time and what one might do to evade death:
“Yôngshí” (originally published 2021). This is a brief, delicate meditation on mortality and the all-too-human hunger for more time. It captures the tragic inevitability of a folktale in its ritualistic rhythms. Quite lovely.
“Teeter Totter” (first published in this volume). A witch is taken by Death to the underworld, but she isn’t ready to give up on the humble life she had made with her husband among the living. Sweetly heartbreaking.
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