Masquerade (MM)

“Sensuous, sexy, & at times surreal. A Nabokovian puzzle with a hint of Hitchcock.” —Juli Min, author of ShanghailandersSet between NY & Shanghai, Masquerade is a queer coming-of-age mystery about a lovelorn bartender & his complex friendship with a volatile artist.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 & imagined begin to blur.Exploring social, cultural, & sexual identities in New York, Shanghai, & beyond, Mike Fu’s Masquerade is a skillfully layered, brilliantly interwoven debut novel of friendship, queer longing, & worlds on the brink, asking how we can find ourselves among ghosts of all kinds, & who we can trust when nothing—and no one—is as it seems.°°°Mike Fu is a Chinese American writer, editor, & translator based in Tokyo. He has studied in Los Angeles, NY, Paris, Suzhou, & 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 & shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose. He is a cofounder & former translation editor of The Shanghai Literary Review, & recently completed his PhD in cultural studies at Waseda U. MikeFu.meinstagram.com/wheatfulargeheartedboy.com/2024/10/31/mike-fus-book-notes-music-playlist-for-his-novel-masquerade "A surreal, queer, coming-of-age mystery set between New York and Shanghai."—TIME, A Best Book of Fall 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...