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by Mike Fu
Set between New York and Shanghai, Masquerade is a queer coming-of-age mystery about a lovelorn bartender and his complex friendship with a volatile artist.
Newly single Meadow Liu is house-sitting for his friend, artist Selma Shimizu, when he stumbles upon The Masquerade, a translated novel about a masked ball in 1930s Shanghai. The author's name is the same as Meadow's own in Chinese, Liu Tian―a coincidence that proves to be the first of many strange happenings. Over the course of a single summer, Meadow must contend with a possibly haunted apartment, a mirror that plays tricks, a stranger speaking in riddles at the bar where he works, as well as a startling revelation about a former lover. And when Selma vanishes from her artist residency, Meadow is forced to question everything he knows as the boundaries between real and imagined begin to blur.
Exploring social, cultural, and sexual identities in New York, Shanghai, and beyond, Mike Fu's Masquerade is a skillfully layered, brilliantly interwoven debut novel of friendship, queer longing, and worlds on the brink, asking how we can find ourselves among ghosts of all kinds, and who we can trust when nothing―and no one―is as it seems.
"Questions of identity, reality, and possibility unfold." ―Library Journal
"Stylistically daring, with jigsaw plotting, lush sensuality, and a tender emotional core, Mike Fu's Masquerade is a subtle and self-assured debut. A book that is as much about the brittle threads of reality that bind us as it is about how easily they are shattered." ―Jinwoo Chong, author of Flux
"Sensuous, sexy, and at times surreal, Mike Fu's Masquerade paints an unforgettable portrait of a young man standing on the cusp of creative agency. Masquerade is a mesmeric fever dream of a novel about the powers and boundaries of life, love, and art. Through writing that pulses with animus, danger, and―at all times―beauty, Fu introduces hidden, decadent corners of the singular cities of Shanghai, old Shanghai, and New York. A Nabokovian puzzle with a hint of Hitchcock and an altogether original cast." ―Juli Min, author of Shanghailanders
"Masquerade captures that ephemeral blossom of youth, of carefree days bumming smokes from crushes and spilling cocktails on strangers, as well as the dreaded anticipation of loneliness and self-doubt on the last train home. From here, it provokes the reader to take part in an irresistible mystery. Mike Fu's writing is vivid and cinematic, unforgettably rendering the vibey-cool of diasporic Shanghai and the restless pulsing of New York's heart." ―Xuan Juliana Wang, author of Home Remedies
This information about Masquerade was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Mike Fu is a writer, translator, and editor based in Japan. He has studied in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Suzhou, and Tokyo. His Chinese-English translation of Stories of the Sahara by the late Taiwanese cultural icon Sanmao was named a Favorite Book of the Year by The Paris Review and shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose. He is a cofounder and former translation editor of The Shanghai Literary Review, and currently a PhD candidate at Waseda University.
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