I knew nothing about F. Scott Fitzgerald when I stumbled on Tender Is the Night in 1962. I didn’t know he’d struggled with the book for almost nine years, and that during his lifetime it never settled into a finished version. I was a naive and ignorant twenty-year-old, studying English and French literature at the University of Melbourne, an unawakened literary snob who had hardly read anything twentieth-century American in her life, and was weighed down by the mighty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European novels and poetry that we were to study for final examinations. I pulled the Fitzgerald off a shelf in the bookshop where I had a summer job. It was so delicious and joyful to read, I could canter through it with such bright and sudden pleasure, that it felt almost criminal. Secretly I knew it was way too enjoyable to be literature.

Two years later, practicing for final exams, we were given a page of prose to translate from English into French. I was a lazy student, barely keeping up, and I dreaded these exercises. I turned over the sheet of paper and was staggered to see that the passage was from Tender Is the Night.

On the shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stood a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel. Deferential palms cooled its flushed façade, and before it stretched a short dazzling beach. Now it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; in 1925 it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April; only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water-lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away. The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows.

Deferential palms cooled its flushed façade? The bright tan prayer rug of the beach? I looked up at the lecturer, a scornful Frenchwoman in her forties. A sardonic smile crossed her face. I put down my pen and lowered my forehead to the desk. Did she think I was regretting all the classes I’d missed, the afternoons I’d spent down in the city watching Westerns and Bergman movies, or drinking and shouting in the beer garden with the architecture students? She was right: I hadn’t a clue how to translate these images—but faced with the impossible task, I was struck dumb for the first time by their depth and richness. She couldn’t have known what a gift she’d handed me. My boxed-in ideas of whose writing could be taken seriously had just been blown sky-high. She probably thought I was panicking, about to cry, but I was taking off my hat and bowing low. I was humbled, freed, and giddy with jubilation.

Besides Britney, bottled water is Kentwood’s biggest export. Across most of Louisiana, this town is more famous for the water than the woman. “Why are you going to the water bottle town?” the man sitting next to me at the bar asks. I’m in New Orleans, on Carondelet Street.

I’m eating at an oyster counter near my grandfather’s former office. Not his favorite, the Black Pearl, where he used to eat a dozen daily on his lunch breaks, grading each one on a scale of 1–10 in his notebook. He died at the start of spring this year, smack in the middle of Carnival, the ambulance stuck in parade traffic for an hour. When I tell the man next to me I’m going to Britney Spears’s hometown to see her house, he says he saw her perform before she became Britney Spears, when she was still Britney from Kentwood, at a concert called Louisiana Jukebox. She was there with her mother, answering audience questions after the show. A childhood friend of my mother’s was there, too, and had incidentally emailed me about it the night before. It was disturbing, she remembered; Britney was so young, but her “song was so sexual, and in person, she looked like the girl next door who every man wants to devirginize.”

The next morning, the drive through St. John the Baptist Parish is mostly swamp. Highways on thick stilts through the cypress glens; the long, low bridge over Lake Pontchartrain. Two men fishing, smoking, laughing. Once you cross into Tangipahoa Parish, you’re mostly on dry land, which means Bible billboards and fast-food spots.

On the off-ramp into town, I see the water tower emblazoned with the Kentwood logo, familiar from plastic bottles. I drive down the town’s main street, past buildings with drooping awnings and wilting, cantilevered roofs, an abandoned white brick structure that reads “Kentwood Glass” in faded, sky-blue letters and a boarded-up bar called Sip Some Daiquiris. I stop at a red light next to This & That Pawn Shop, across from a café called The Cafe, which does appear to be an accurate moniker. It’s the only one in town. I knew Kentwood would be small—the cottage industry of Britney documentaries all describe it as a sleepy town, and a denizen of a Britney message board I’ve browsed periodically for years returned from their own trip here only to post that the area had a “southern gothic vibe” and note, appalled, that “there is NO WALMART, MCDONALDS, or HOSPITALS.” A visiting reporter once observed that Britney was forced to “travel an hour to shop at her nearest Abercrombie and Fitch.” I pull into a spot at the Sonic for sustenance and Diet Coke. Britney was repeatedly followed here and photographed and the resulting images posted to gossip sites. I remember scrolling the zoomed-in shots of Britney and her sister fingering fries, avoiding the camera’s eye. Britney had one hand on the wheel, the other headed for her mouth. Thanksgiving 2010.

The new Winter issue of The Paris Review, no. 246, includes an Art of Fiction interview with the Chinese writer Yu Hua, the author of novels such as To Live, Brothers, and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. We asked Yu to contribute a syllabus to our ongoing series, and he obliged with a list of recommendations that he’s provided to his students—but, as he says in his interview, remember not to be narrowly focused on reading lists: “Literature is not the only thing in my life. I encourage my students to think this way, too. Recently, I told one of them, ‘Let’s meet this afternoon to talk about the story you wrote,’ and he said, ‘Professor, I’m going clubbing tonight.’ I said, ‘All right, have fun.’ ”

I am a professor of creative writing at Beijing Normal University, and with few exceptions, most of my students have no experience writing before enrolling in my course. We begin with short stories before transitioning to novellas, a literary form uniquely popular in China—works of fiction between thirty thousand and a hundred thousand Chinese characters. Julio Cortázar’s “The Southern Thruway” and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach are both excellent examples.

When recommending literary works to my students, I base my suggestions on two principles. The first is to avoid works that are already extremely well-known in China, which most of my students will have read during senior middle school or high school. (The Old Man and the Sea, which I ask them to reread, is an exception to that rule.) The second principle is to tailor my lists to students’ individual writing goals.

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Hospitals play a big role in Yu Hua’s life and fiction—his parents were both doctors, he grew up in and around hospitals as a child, his first job was that of a dentist, and hospitals would later frequently appear in his work as sites of violence and trauma. Yu Hua first made a name for himself in the eighties with a series of dark, violent, experimental short stories, but over the course of his career, his writing became more conventional, earning him a broad readership and fame in the process. But what if Yu Hua had gone the other direction? What if he had gone darker, stranger, more experimental? If one is looking for someone to inherit the lineage of Yu Hua’s early experimentalism today, I would point them to Han Song’s Hospital trilogy, which not only shares a fascination with the medical setting but also presents an unflinching look at the violence lurking just under the surface of the everyday. It is no coincidence then that, during a recent interview I conducted with Han Song when he was speaking of his formative influences, he told me: “I was particularly fascinated by Yu Hua at that time and even imitated him.”

Comprised of three full-length novels, Hospital, Exorcism, and Dead Souls, the trilogy begins in a fairly conventional manner. Yang Wei, a forty-year-old government worker who moonlights as a songwriter, is struck down with a bout of debilitating stomach pain after checking into a hotel in C City during a business trip. The pain is so horrific that Yang Wei passes out, awakening three days later to find two female employees from the hotel taking him to the hospital. From there, Han Song takes us on a Kafkaesque journey where the protagonist undergoes countless tests, procedures, and operations. He is sent from one wing of the hospital to another, waiting in long lines, vying for the attention of any one of the mysterious doctors who inhabit the hospital, and yet seemingly unable to get any information, let alone a diagnosis. The longer he stays in the hospital the more lost he becomes, until reality itself seems to unravel around him and he descends into a labyrinthine nightmare of the strange.

Translating the trilogy has fully consumed, even haunted me, since 2020. Reading it is a challenging experience and certainly not for everyone. The series contains frequent descriptions of pain, rape, murder, suicide, and cannibalism, but even more disturbing, in a way, is its unconventional use of language, unusual structure, and shifting perspectives (Hospital is written in third person, Exorcism in first person, and Dead Souls in second). It contains dense references to medical terminology, scientific history, Buddhism, Christianity, Japanese pop culture, and classic literature and philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Kafka and Sartre, with plenty of veiled references to the political reality of contemporary China along the way. The series is categorized as “science fiction” by booksellers in China and abroad, but that is misleading. For a while, I described it as a mash-up between science fiction, horror, suspense, social realism, and avant-garde literature; think a hallucinogenic David Cronenberg film written by Franz Kafka and set during a Chinese politburo meeting. But I’m not sure if even that description does the series justice. Over the past three years, as I have slowly worked through the translation, my understanding of the series has evolved. I am always discovering new layers of meaning hidden within the book’s devilishly complex narrative.