Quick Collections - The Book of Shanghai: A City in Short Fiction, ed. Jin Li & Dai Congrong

So I admit I wasn’t quite sure what I was getting into when I agreed to look at this anthology. I’m no stranger to translated fiction, but my reading is heavily SFF, and this collection doesn’t pretend to be trying to be entirely that. Most of the stories are fiction, many with moments of weirdness, of dream-like fluidity, but few are really speculative in nature. Rather, the anthology seems to be (from what I gather from the introduction and from the mood and themes of the stories) an exploration and a sort of mapping of the city of Shanghai, its literary movements and moments--a feel of what the city is to those writers who know it, who might bring it to life in some ways as a character. And so we have The Book of Shanghai: A City in Short Fiction from Comma Press.