Horizon Hong Kong

HORIZON HONG KONG
by Xu Xi 許素細
ISBN: 978-1-958652-25-1
eISBN: 978-1-958652-26-8
$22 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8.5” / 288
Gaudy Boy, July 2026
N. America: Asterism / Bookshop.org/ Amazon
Distributed by Asterism & Ingram

“A collection of heartbreaks and awakenings set to lightning.” —Junot Díaz, author, This Is How You Lose Her

A siren call to Hong Kong’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow, envisioned by one of the city’s most prescient and unapologetic writers.

About

One of Hong Kong’s leading English writers, Xu Xi investigates and invigorates the transnational, transcultural, and translingual dimensions of her beloved city in these 22 stories covering the 1960s to the present day. Written against the backdrop of tremendous political change—from Hong Kong’s transformation from a British colony to a Chinese Special Administrative Region in 1997 to the political turmoil of the 2014 Occupy Hong Kong protests and the 2019 Polytechnic University occupation—Xu’s stories capture the intimate realities of lives led and choices made under the shadow of a city that looms large in our imagination. 

A cast of idiosyncratic local and expatriate characters navigates what it means to love, leave, and return again and again to their home city: a young girl obsesses over an orange-haired lady from Chung King Mansion; a massage therapist practices English with a client; a woman appeals to reinstate her American work visa or face deportation; a man reluctantly attends his high school’s thirty-fifth reunion dinner; and monkeys are appointed academic residency at the local university.

Horizon Hong Kong demonstrates the power and range of Xu Xi’s oeuvre, its stories Hong Kong’s and also the world’s. 

Author

XU XI 許素細, xuxiwriter.com, an Indonesian-Chinese-American from Hong Kong, has published sixteen books—five novels, nine prose collections, one memoir, one coauthored textbook—and edited four anthologies of English Hong Kong literature. Her recent titles include Monkey in Residence and Other Speculations (2022), This Fish is Fowl: Essays of Being (2019), Dear Hong Kong: An Elegy for a City (2017), the novel That Man in Our Lives (2016), and the textbook The Art and Craft of Asian Stories (2021). A writer-in-residence at Arizona State University, City University of Hong Kong, and University of Iowa, Xu has directed two international MFAs. She held the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. In another life, she held management positions at The Asian Wall Street Journal, Federal Express, and Pinkerton’s. A diehard transnational, she now lives between New York and the rest of the world. @xuxiwriter FB, Instagram, LinkedIn

Praise

“A brilliant moving and startling collection by one of the most brilliant moving and startling writers alive. I lack the words to capture the full sweep of these uncommonly beautiful stories, the human majesty and impossible histories they encompass. If you’re going to read one book of stories this year, read Horizon Hong Kong, a collection of heartbreaks and awakenings set to lightning. A truly towering achievement.”
—Junot Díaz, author, This Is How You Lose Her and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao  

“This is the city written aslant: anguish, desire, and cosmopolitan complexity are rendered with sparky, clever wisdom and formal inventiveness. Horizon Hong Kong offers above all a focused compassion for those who carry in their hearts the layered history of this place; the pull to stay or leave, the contest of languages, the colonial history and the complications of the handover and its aftermath.” 
—Gail Jones, author, Salonika Burning and One Another

“This wonderful collection is long overdue. Xu Xi’s stories have formidable range, and with searing insight, she can recreate the isolation of being half a world from friends and family as skillfully as she expresses rage against disappearances, whether what is lost are children or sex workers or the city of Hong Kong itself. Politics from Beijing to London to New York are a constant backdrop to her characters’ lives. There is a boldness to Xu Xi’s descriptions of a particularly female experience of the world. Though she has often been called a transnational writer, she captures the universal in migration, separation, family obligations and our dreams, ambitions and disappointments all set against an ever-changing and turbulent Hong Kong.”
—Kim Echlin, author, The Disappeared

“Xu Xi portrays the cosmopolitan salad bowls of Hong Kong, America, and Europe with humor and pathos, with the subtlety, complexity, and inherent contradictions of a writer who knows her source. From the realist 1960s through present day to the speculative future, these diverse stories illuminate and challenge. They skewer shallowness and deeply move us.”
—Alison Wong, author, As the Earth Turns Silver

“The greatest pleasure of Xu Xi’s kaleidoscopic collection lies in how she captures the psychological tensions of lives shaped by an ever-changing, cosmopolitan city . . . Xu Xi’s characters are poised at various thresholds, each grappling with a boundary that beckons and restrains, alluring in its promise yet coercive in its limits.”
—Dorothy Tse, author, Owlish

“Hong Kong and its unruly denizens have never burned brighter or left a deeper impression on the soul than in Xu Xi’s remarkable corpus of fiction. To read her is to step into the gaze of someone who has had her eye on the truest, the most shameful, and also the most loving and enduring parts of our inner selves; to read her is to realize you’re in the hands of one of the most beguiling storytellers our culture has ever produced.”
—Daryl Qilin Yam, author, Lovelier, Lonelier

“I have been a fan of both Xu Xi’s short fiction and her essays for the twenty-six years I’ve known her. I teach her work regularly, every semester in fact. I love, for instance, how her essay ‘Citizenship’ and her satirical fiction ‘All About Skin’ are in dialogue with one another about national and ethnic identity. Whether writing fiction or essays, Xu Xi is always crossing boundaries and surprising us with her observations about displacement, hybridity, and the remarkable contradiction at the heart of her work: an unsentimental nostalgia for a lost Hong Kong, paired with a critical wonder about the rest of the world. I’m grateful to have a book that collects so much of her work under one cover.”
—Robin Hemley, author, How to Change History

“In these 22 luminous and unforgettable stories, Xu Xi deftly sets the demands of modern individuality against the obligations of memory, family, history, politics, and, most stubbornly, place—Hong Kong, a city caught between East and West, rich and poor. The results are electric. This is a collection to treasure.”
—Robert Anthony Siegel, author, Criminals