The Great Fracture

The Great Fracture is the first collection of novellas and short stories by the writer and director Hu Qian (original name Hu Bo, 1988–2017), published by Jiuzhou Press in January 2017 and collecting fifteen stories written between late 2012 and 2016. The title comes from a novella of the same name; set in a remote school converted from a chemical plant, it follows a group of young people repeatedly defeated by the college entrance exam and by life as they search in a wasteland-like existence for a way out like a song reaching the clouds, and it won first prize at the sixth BenQ Chinese World Film and Fiction Award. The collection also includes Elephant Sitting Still, A Long Shut-Eye, A Wisp of Smoke, Air Gun, The Hound Man, The Wedding, Shoelaces, Stillness, Barren Road, Pouring Straight Down, Sheep, The Date, and Mary Yo-Yo, mostly about young people, losers, and drifters on the margins of the city, written in a hard, restrained style with emotions low and explosive. It opens with prefaces by Huang Liqun, The Clear-Eyed in a Dark Room, and by Wang Xiaoshuai, The Boy Who Left the Ranks. In the afterword the author says that from 2013 he consciously stripped away linguistic ornament and beautification, treating writing as a way to face life squarely and to resist the world's grayness; these stories portray the self and others gradually seen clearly in personal growth, as well as the city, destruction, and a sense of the end of the world, and the individual's disappointment in existence. Elephant Sitting Still was later adapted by the author into a film of the same name, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2018 and won awards.