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Selected Stories by Xuemo 雪漠小说精选
Selected Stories by Xuemo is a collection of stories set on the Silk Road, exploring love, faith, life, and death. The first three stories depict the lives and relationships of outsiders in rural villages, and offer a contemporary perspective on the impact of rumor, pain, and suffering. The final novella is a survival story of two young women journeying through the desert, accompanied by camels and dholes.
These tales are a bridge to the novels by the author Xuemo. Xuemo's writing is deeply influenced by his native roots in Gansu province and captures the essence of traditional Chinese culture. Xuemo is known as a spiritual writer whose work presents an alternative lifestyle for people today. His distinctive style combines hallucinatory realism with the depiction of the harsh reality of rural life, and the inner worlds of Chinese people. Xuemo's work enjoys extensive media coverage and critical acclaim in China and is considered a quintessential example of literature from the western provinces.
Selected Stories by Xue Mo has been translated into more than 15 languages. This English version is translated by Sinologist Nicky Harman. The Guardian newspaper published one story - "Old Man Xinjiang" - in their five top short stories from contemporary China collection.
These tales are a bridge to the novels by the author Xuemo. Xuemo's writing is deeply influenced by his native roots in Gansu province and captures the essence of traditional Chinese culture. Xuemo is known as a spiritual writer whose work presents an alternative lifestyle for people today. His distinctive style combines hallucinatory realism with the depiction of the harsh reality of rural life, and the inner worlds of Chinese people. Xuemo's work enjoys extensive media coverage and critical acclaim in China and is considered a quintessential example of literature from the western provinces.
Selected Stories by Xue Mo has been translated into more than 15 languages. This English version is translated by Sinologist Nicky Harman. The Guardian newspaper published one story - "Old Man Xinjiang" - in their five top short stories from contemporary China collection.
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Published September 30, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 15, 2025
I read Xuemo’s Selected Stories in 2024, during a weeknd trip to Deegha, a place where the air tastes like chilled ocean. I had gone there with Arindam, a colleague-turned-friend, as a much-needed escape from a stressful year.
We stayed at a modest homestay above Gandhi Road, where the rooms always smelt of damp wood and cinnamon. On the first night, unable to sleep, I opened Xuemo’s collection—and the entire trip became infused with his desert-worlds, Tibetan myths, and sweeping visions of human fate.
Xuemo is a writer of landscape. His stories breathe dust, wind, and silence. They carry the pulse of Western China’s rugged terrain, blending mysticism with stark realism. Reading him in the chilly breeze of the ocean, created an unexpected resonance: my world was wrapped in sea mist; his stories burnt with desert heat. The contrast was electrifying.
The first story hit me like a slow shock—its quiet tenderness erupting into something raw and mythic. I remember pausing, looking out the window at the sleeping town below. The lights looked like scattered embers. Arindam had already fallen asleep, snoring lightly, and the sky outside was dissolving into the kind of darkness only beach nights can produce.
Xuemo’s prose felt like listening to an ancient storyteller by a desert fire. His recurring themes—destiny, suffering, redemption, erotic longing, spiritual hunger—felt strangely universal yet culturally rooted.
The rhythmic repetition, the philosophical undercurrent, the symbolic weight of even the smallest gesture… everything pulled me deeper.
One afternoon, while Arindam went for a long walk, I sat on the terrace with a steaming cup of first-flush Darjeeling tea and continued reading. Breeze rolled in and out like a living creature, sometimes swallowing the entire view, sometimes revealing the ocean's gleaming vision. Against that backdrop, Xuemo’s descriptions of wind-eroded cliffs and nomadic rituals felt like echoes from another dimension.
I realised how profoundly landscape shapes identity—his characters carried the desert inside them the way I carry rivers, humidity, and monsoon skies.
The story that moved me most was about a wandering monk whose journey is as much internal as physical. His conflicts—temptation, doubt, transcendence—felt deeply familiar, mirroring parts of my own personal restlessness that year. Deegha's stillness offered the perfect space for those reflections. I remember closing the book and simply breathing, letting the cold sea breeze settle my thoughts.
Arindam noticed the effect the book was having on me.
“You look different,” he said one evening over momo and thukpa.
“Desert ghosts,” I joked.
But the truth was that Xuemo had quietly rearranged something inside me.
Some nights, the silence of the hills would feel almost too vast. I’d open the book again, and Xuemo’s firm, compassionate storytelling would steady me. His understanding of human suffering is unflinching, but never despairing. He allows his characters to break and mend with dignity.
What I carry most from that reading experience is a sense of inner expansion. Xuemo widened my imagination—not horizontally, but vertically, digging deeper into the psychological and spiritual terrains of his characters. His world felt foreign yet strangely intimate, and reading him in a place as serene and introspective as Deegha heightened every emotion.
By the time the trip ended, I realised that the book had become inseparable from the town’s quiet. Even now, whenever I think of Xuemo, I smell woodsmoke and tea. I see a sea breeze weaving through pine trees. I hear distant temple bells. His stories have become part of that personal geography.
Selected Stories remains one of the most powerful cross-cultural reading experiences of my life. It taught me that literature doesn’t just travel across borders—it transforms you in the place where you happen to be.
For me, that place was Deegha's cold terraces, a friend’s quiet companionship, and a winter when I desperately needed both distance and depth.
We stayed at a modest homestay above Gandhi Road, where the rooms always smelt of damp wood and cinnamon. On the first night, unable to sleep, I opened Xuemo’s collection—and the entire trip became infused with his desert-worlds, Tibetan myths, and sweeping visions of human fate.
Xuemo is a writer of landscape. His stories breathe dust, wind, and silence. They carry the pulse of Western China’s rugged terrain, blending mysticism with stark realism. Reading him in the chilly breeze of the ocean, created an unexpected resonance: my world was wrapped in sea mist; his stories burnt with desert heat. The contrast was electrifying.
The first story hit me like a slow shock—its quiet tenderness erupting into something raw and mythic. I remember pausing, looking out the window at the sleeping town below. The lights looked like scattered embers. Arindam had already fallen asleep, snoring lightly, and the sky outside was dissolving into the kind of darkness only beach nights can produce.
Xuemo’s prose felt like listening to an ancient storyteller by a desert fire. His recurring themes—destiny, suffering, redemption, erotic longing, spiritual hunger—felt strangely universal yet culturally rooted.
The rhythmic repetition, the philosophical undercurrent, the symbolic weight of even the smallest gesture… everything pulled me deeper.
One afternoon, while Arindam went for a long walk, I sat on the terrace with a steaming cup of first-flush Darjeeling tea and continued reading. Breeze rolled in and out like a living creature, sometimes swallowing the entire view, sometimes revealing the ocean's gleaming vision. Against that backdrop, Xuemo’s descriptions of wind-eroded cliffs and nomadic rituals felt like echoes from another dimension.
I realised how profoundly landscape shapes identity—his characters carried the desert inside them the way I carry rivers, humidity, and monsoon skies.
The story that moved me most was about a wandering monk whose journey is as much internal as physical. His conflicts—temptation, doubt, transcendence—felt deeply familiar, mirroring parts of my own personal restlessness that year. Deegha's stillness offered the perfect space for those reflections. I remember closing the book and simply breathing, letting the cold sea breeze settle my thoughts.
Arindam noticed the effect the book was having on me.
“You look different,” he said one evening over momo and thukpa.
“Desert ghosts,” I joked.
But the truth was that Xuemo had quietly rearranged something inside me.
Some nights, the silence of the hills would feel almost too vast. I’d open the book again, and Xuemo’s firm, compassionate storytelling would steady me. His understanding of human suffering is unflinching, but never despairing. He allows his characters to break and mend with dignity.
What I carry most from that reading experience is a sense of inner expansion. Xuemo widened my imagination—not horizontally, but vertically, digging deeper into the psychological and spiritual terrains of his characters. His world felt foreign yet strangely intimate, and reading him in a place as serene and introspective as Deegha heightened every emotion.
By the time the trip ended, I realised that the book had become inseparable from the town’s quiet. Even now, whenever I think of Xuemo, I smell woodsmoke and tea. I see a sea breeze weaving through pine trees. I hear distant temple bells. His stories have become part of that personal geography.
Selected Stories remains one of the most powerful cross-cultural reading experiences of my life. It taught me that literature doesn’t just travel across borders—it transforms you in the place where you happen to be.
For me, that place was Deegha's cold terraces, a friend’s quiet companionship, and a winter when I desperately needed both distance and depth.
April 29, 2023
In the story,the first novel Old man Xinjiang lives a plain and peaceful life because he has a clean and beautiful love without any desire.
Yue'er, who had a dirt disease, lost her feet in a confused city, but was relieved by her pure yearning at a later stage of her life.
It so good, and touching. Desert to read and collect.
Yue'er, who had a dirt disease, lost her feet in a confused city, but was relieved by her pure yearning at a later stage of her life.
It so good, and touching. Desert to read and collect.
April 25, 2025
I liked the stories written. Although the stories are very sad, they are very interesting, romantic and beautiful.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews