Purple Perilla is a cycle of three short stories by avant-garde Chinese writer Can Xue. Moving from an urban center into wilderness, they explore human confrontations with the unknown. The stories stack, like strata, to form an island. One that, to journey through, is to be forced into the subconscious and an entirely contemporary mythos.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
"The humanism of the past five hundred years is dead. Believing man was exceptional, it opened the abyss of extinction. A new approach is needed to re-enchant the world and establish the commonality of all life on Earth. This is not just the task of politics and philosophy. It requires the effort of all those who tear down convention in order to preserve what is meaningful. That is, the preservation not just of environments, but myth, irrationality, autonomy, and joy—whether by direct or poetic means. New islands—of thought, literature, art—are already emerging. We find these points of orientation, mapping a scattered community that spans continents and disciplines. To represent a world of many worlds, not a globe.
Our books revive the extinct genre of isolarii—the ‘island books’ that emerged at the start of the Renaissance. Bound together were poems, stories, and artworks—each a supposed island, a space that held a singular idea.
We take up this genre-bending format to navigate the turbulence of our times. Each book is a ready-to-hand island. Together, they are a growing archipelago. Islands from which to view the world anew."