Isham Cook

The Exact Unknown and Other Tales of Modern China Isham Cook

A foreign teacher struggles with proper whipping technique on his female student, while another gives his student a mysterious substance otherwise known as LSD. In other stories, a sex robot rapes its owner, a female professor trolls cafés minus her underwear, a store clerk softens up a stingy customer with his fist, and a foreigner comprehends all too slowly the home he is visiting is not a family but a scam. Whether it's locals colliding with foreigners or with each other on the big chessboard with no rules called China, this pioneering collection of delightfully disturbing tales by one unruly foreigner dredges up comedy blacker than a black hole. "Cook's erotic-grotesque collection of encounters can't be beat for its look into the absurdist funhouse mirror of expatriate existence in China"-James Farrer, Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai "Strips away the literary decorum of the old guard of China writers and presents us with an intoxicating, and at times toxic, Chinese cocktail of freshly fashioned creations of flesh and fantasy"-Tom Carter, Unsavory Elements "Breaks all taboos...reminiscent of Sing-song Girls of Shanghai"-Susan Blumberg-Kason, Good Chinese Wife