Original title:

乌有猫

Original language: 

Simplified Chinese

Publication info:

Yuefu Culture

November 2021

256 pages

Genre:

Literary fiction

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Rights handled by New River: 

Foreign rights

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Rights sold:

Italy (Garzanti)

Germany (Suhrkamp)

WEL (HarperVia)

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Invisible Kitties
 by Yu Yoyo

Invisible Kitties follows a young couple's life and their relationship with cats: some they live with; some exist only in their imagination. Cats, for them, cannot be defined: they drop from the sky, they grow from the soil, they transmute. They fly, flow, and evaporate. They can become invisible; they can also be ubiquitous. They conquer humans; they heal humans. Subtitled A Feline Study of Fluid Mechanics or Spurious Incidents of the Cats in the Night-Time, this debut novel is composed of 60 sequential pieces with the author's own illustrations. Written in Yu Yoyo's signature poetic language, lithe, sharp, and witty, Invisible Kitties explores imagination and the imaginable through the descriptions of cats, which reminds us of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. The young couple's everyday life, often eclipsed by the drama of the cats, offers a gentle look into the poetics of the quotidian, reminiscent of The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide. 

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About the author

Yu Yoyo (1990-) is an acclaimed poet and artist from Sichuan, China. First published at the age of fourteen, her work earned critical attention at sixteen. She has since published several collections and her work has featured in various literary journals and anthologies. She won the 2017 Henry Luce Translation Fellowship, and her poems have been translated into several languages. A selection of her poems was published by Poetry Translation Centre in her first English collection, My Tenantless Body (2019). Invisible Kitties is her first novel. She lives in Chengdu.