Owlish: Dorothy Tse and Natascha Bruce
This event has been canceled.
Green Apple Books on the Park | 1231 9th Avenue | San Francisco, CA
About Owlish
With your face covered, sneaking into a city you thought you knew, are you still yourself? Or have you crossed to another world, where the streets are unpredictable and the people strangers, where you might at any moment run into some unknown dream version of yourself?
In a city called Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lackluster career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition: a music box ballerina named Aliss who has tantalizingly sprung to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty.
The mountainous city of Nevers is itself a mercurial character with concrete flesh, glimmering new construction, and “colonial flair.” Having fled there as a child refugee, Q thought he knew the faces of the city and its people, but Nevers is alive with secrets and shape-shifting geographies. The winner of a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, Owlish is a fantastically eerie debut novel that is also a bold exploration of life under oppressive regimes.
Dorothy Tse is a writer from Hong Kong. Her debut novel, Owlish, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize, and her short story collection, Snow and Shadow, was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award. A cofounder of the literary journal Fleurs des Lettres, she has received the Hong Kong Book Prize, the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award. Her novel City Like Water came out with Graywolf Press in March 2026.
Natascha Bruce translates from Chinese. Her work includes Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon (shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize), Bloodline by Patigül, Lake Like a Mirror by Ho Sok Fong (shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation), A Classic Tragedy by Xu Xiaobin (co-translated with Nicky Harman), and Mystery Train by Can Xue. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim grant for Owlish by Dorothy Tse. She and Tse were among the winners of the 2019 Words Without Borders Poems in Translation Contest.