From a rising literary star, an epic historical novel, set against the tense backdrop of the Long March and Mao's rise to power, that tells a powerful and moving story of two ordinary peopleChina, 1934: A naive orphan and shy gunsmith, Ping, has fallen in love with Yong, who is a sophisticated veteran, a skilled marksman, and a true believer in Marxist ideology. Winning her affections will take an ideological battle-something he does not understand. To make matters worse, Yong has shown interest in Ping's best friend, Luo. On the eve of a great Communist defeat, Ping sabotages Luo's rifle, causing the bullet to backfire into his friend's head. The army begins its year-long retreat, known as The Long March, and Yong turns to Ping for comfort and companionship. Ping deeply regrets killing his friend, and as his relationship with Yong blossoms, he is saddened that it will always be colored by guilt. Yong soon becomes pregnant. She hates the way the baby inside is changing her, both physically and emotionally. The Red Army can't retreat with a crying infant, so they need to find someone close to take the baby in. Ping and Yong leave their son with a woman, promising to return once the war is won. When World War II breaks out and Japanese soldiers arrive, their 12-year-old son decides to enlist in the Japanese army to find his parents, though he quickly begins to fear for his life . . . Deeply moving and brilliantly written, Michael X. Wang's Lost in the Long March is an exploration of how the history of a country is always its people, though their stories are often the first to be lost.

Steeped in a long history of violence and suffering, Michael X. Wang's debut collection of short stories interrogates personal and political events set against the backdrop of China that are both real and perceived, imagined and speculative. Wang plunges us into the fictional Chinese village of Xinchun and beyond to explore themes of tradition, family, modernity, and immigration in a country grappling with its modern identity. Violence enters the pastoral when Chinese villagers are flung down a well by Japanese soldiers and forced to abandon their crops and families to work in the coal mines, a tugboat driver dredges up something more than garbage polluting the Suzhou River, and rural and urban landscapes are pitted against each other when young villagers are promised high-paying work in the city but face violent persecution instead. In this world where China has regressed back to its imperial days, we meet an emperor who demands total servitude and swift punishment for attempts at revolution, and we follow a father who immigrates to the United States for a better life and loses everything in a tragic accident-aside from his estranged son-with whom he stubbornly refuses to make amends. Further News of Defeat is rich with characters who have known struggle and defeat and who find themselves locked in pivotal moments of Chinese history-such as World War II and the Tiananmen Square massacre-as they face losses of the highest order and still find cause for revival. Further News of Defeat is the winner of the 2019 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize.