Yan Ge’s collection of short stories, Elsewhere is a fascinating work, and the range she exhibits is enormous: we meet a group of individuals in China who were displaced during an earthquake, we are confronted with political dynamics in Confucius’s academy, we follow a young woman dealing with the aftermath of a miscarriage during a trip to Burma, and we witness the strange occurrence of a woman who falls in love with a man she barely knows after his death.

In short, these stories are strange. They are also remarkably well-written and touched my played my heartstrings like a fiddle.

I’m not sure how Yan generated the ideas for her stories: there is no way that this is all “auto-fiction.” As such, it is obvious to me that the writer has an imagination transcending the typical limits of most people. Inhabiting her head, even just for a little while, is a wondrous experience and I wish I could have access to worlds like these all the time. It is writers like Yan Ge who make others–like me–want to become writers.

Highly recommend.