The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Praise
The Secrets of Bats
The American Girl
For You
The Train to Lo Wu
The Ferry
Revolutions
Heaven Lake
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright Page
For Sonya
You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.
Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer . . .
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Praise for Jess Row’s THE TRAIN TO LO WU
“From New York to Hong Kong, Jess Row’s stories take us to worlds that are both familiar and strange. It is rare to find the spirit and mind combined so deftly as in these stories. This is a magnificent collection.”
—Charles Baxter
“In The Train to Lo Wu Jess Row has located the very heart of modern spirituality in this most commercial of cities. This is a debut that feels like a crowning achievement.”
—Edmund White
“[A]n intelligent and gifted young writer . . . [these stories] have an unusual subtlety and depth of insight.”
—Baltimore Sun
“Jess Row writes with elegance and freshness in prose that sounds a depth of feeling. These stories are poems in themselves, haunting in their clarity and sympathies. They achieve a kind of stillness that seems appropriate for their Chinese setting. I can hardly imagine a more forceful or memorable debut.”
—Jay Parini
“Over and over, these beautifully crafted stories drew me in with their quietly persuasive voices, their meditative detail, and their subtly heartrending plots. An auspicious debut from a talent set to endure.”
—Peter Ho Davies
“In crystalline prose, Row animates intriguing characters and dramatizes subtle yet emblematic conflicts as he traces the vast cultural divides between America and Hong Kong. . . . He neatly and devastatingly contrasts dueling visions of faith, art, love, and freedom.”
—Booklist
“Row’s poetic sensibility lends both depth and economy to each of the stories. . . . Elegant and original, mysterious and down-to-earth, these seven tales make for an auspicious, entertaining debut.”
—Elle
“In sharp, lucid prose, Row molds a landscape of human error and uncertainty, territory well-aligned with eerie topography of his space-age city.”
—Publishers Weekly
“An impressive debut from an admirably protean storyteller . . . Row’s characters are a mixed bunch, but all are effortlessly convincing, and he handles gritty suspense quite as well as he does the problems of lovers. This Whiting Award–winning author has a very bright future.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Row’s stories are subtle . . . and fascinating.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“The stories operate as intuitive, emotional, and, in some cases, romantic responses to one of the most unusual places on earth. . . . The Train to Lo Wu does something great: it opens our eyes to things, inside and out.”
—Believer
“In these seven quiet, deftly drawn stories, characters crisscross various demarcations of politics, history, race, and religion, but, agonizingly, they never seem able to locate one another, let alone themselves.”
—Ploughshares
“The Train to Lo Wu . . . puts Row into a league above the many Western authors trying to capture the spirit of a culture that is not their own.”
—South China Morning Post
“The Train to Lo Wu gives, with admirable breadth and depth, a believable and fluidly portrayed assortment of people, Western and Chinese, who are finding their ways in [Hong Kong]. . . . Row is a clever and subtle writer; like real people, his characters surprise, annoy, and demand empathy from the reader.”
—Shanghai City Weekend
“Many writers have managed to describe Hong Kong, but few have as deft a touch with the Hong Kong people, real people. . . . Read these stories, re-read them, and then remember. You will be richer for it.”
—Asian Review of Books
“These seven stories about Hong Kong people by a young American writer are not only subtle, skillful, and above all exceptionally thoughtful: they could well be the finest fiction ever to have appeared in English about the city. It’s no exaggeration to say