"If you know and love Hong Kong and want to know and love her more, read Xu Xi. Her brilliant riff on the 'city-village' that is also her life moves through changing moods and times in a place of desire, dream and disappearance, sparkling, alert, searchin

"I'm impressed with Xu Xi's essays. Her observations break new ground, frequently surprising the reader with her original perceptions. At the same time this new venture helps me better understand all the work of this well-known story-teller and to underst

"Hong Kong is too fast-changing a place, too disparate and too uncertain a place to be pinned easily to the page, but Xu Xi manages to fit her Hong Kong into an eclectic, perplexing and deeply personal account of her home city." -- Justin Hill, author of T

"It would be wrong to label Xu Xi's Evanescent Isles a memoir. She is more cultural anthropologist and traffic cop standing at the diasporic intersection of the most exciting city in the world - Hong Kong - as political idealism, capitalism, economic tsun

"In Xu Xi's indelible memoir, she captures, in exquisite detail, the evanescence that is Hong Kong. Here, the fortunes of the island and Xu Xi's family rise and fall together as the personal and political intertwine. This journey into history, class, cult

Xu Xi (www.xuxiwriter.com) is one of Hong Kong's leading English language writers. She is the author of six books of fiction and essays, including Overleaf Hong Kong Stories and Essays of the Chinese, Overseas and the novel The Unwalled City. She has also edited several anthologies of Hong Kong writing. Recent awards include the inaugural Man Asian Literary Award shortlist, an O. Henry Prize Story, the first English language Writer-In-Residence at Lingnan University, and the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. She is on the prose faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing, and also teaches writing internationally at various universities. A Chinese-Indonesian native of Hong Kong, she inhabits the flight path along New York, Hong Kong and the South Island of New Zealand.