Book Talk | Masquerade by Mike Fu

“A surreal, queer, coming-of-age mystery set between New York and Shanghai.”?TIME, A Best Book of Fall

A Best Book of October at People, Chicago Review of Books, and The Millions

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.

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.'

Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novel Flux, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and named a best book of 2023 by Esquire, Apple Books, HuffPost, GQ, Cosmopolitan, and Goodreads. His short stories and other work have appeared or are forthcoming in Guernica, The Southern Review, The Rumpus, LitHub, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature. His second novel, I Leave It Up to You, will be published 3.4.25 in the US by Ballantine and the UK & Commonwealth by Scribe.