UNFINISHED BUSINESS Volume I: Tales of the Uncanny, Bargains Mundane, Where Ghosts Haggle and Dead Still Owe

Unfinished Business is a novel that stitches together "local chronicle" and "contemporary tales of the strange." Set against the Railway New Village of a southwestern Chinese city, the book takes the perspective of an antique-curio shop to set five generations of ancient pagodas, construction archives, speculative real-estate developments, and the old shoes, old zithers, and old ledgers of ordinary townsfolk vibrating on the same frequency. There are no ghosts in the traditional sense-only the unfinished business of an era that has been crushed flat, lingering as an atmosphere: seeping into the damp weeping of mortar joints, clinging to the well-stone dust caked on the soles of "big-head" boots, hovering in the midnight-pacing shadow of a "perfect gentleman" whose business card is printed too full. The narrative tempo is restrained; the dialectal texture is raw. The satire never lands in the dialogue-it lands in the details: the signboards along the Street of Uncanny Commerce grow more gaudy and tangled with every passing year. If you've ever lived in one of those old railway compounds-where paulownia roots have cracked the concrete, where an old man squats by the trash bin eating a plain steamed bun with pickles, where at the end of the lane there's a shop selling old things, its owner never raising his voice, the neighbors whispering "that's where they read the yin-house feng shui"-then you can probably step inside this book. It writes about ghosts, but the ghosts aren't there to scare you. It writes about feng shui, but the feng shui isn't in the compass. Beneath the shell of urban tales of the strange, this novel documents some of the most concrete "heart conditions" of contemporary China: algorithmic harvesting, résumé-gilding, the erasure of memory in old-town demolition, the silent cycle of a father's debt passed to his son. No soaring immortals, no earth-shattering sorcery-only the gray-green dust on the soles of canvas shoes, a paulownia-wood zither that rings on its own at midnight, and the alley wind that carries the mingled scent of perfume and swill.