On Elsewhere

Yan Ge’s collection Elsewhere is a fascinating book, and her range is enormous: we meet people in China displaced by an earthquake, get caught up in the political dynamics of Confucius’s academy, follow a young woman through the aftermath of a miscarriage on a trip to Burma, and witness a woman fall in love with a man she barely knew after his death. The stories are strange, and they are also remarkably well-written; they played my heartstrings like a fiddle. I don’t know how Yan came up with them — there’s no way this is all auto-fiction — so it’s plain that her imagination runs well past the usual limits. Inhabiting her head even for a little while is a wondrous thing, and I wish I had access to worlds like these all the time. It’s writers like her who make others, like me, want to write.