Little Pink Book

Lust--caution, lovely Limei! A bad bad novel about a sad sad girl.

＂Olivia Kan-Sperling’s Little Pink Book brilliantly re-stages our interior life as a blanked-out, half-conscious Möbius strip of genre, as good girl gone bad, as pure pink exteriority, as hologram light show, as calligraphic peach latte, and as Orientalism scripted as serial installment to be performed as we read. What’s theory to the avant-garde? Life. What’s life? To be continued.＂
--TAN LIN

＂An intriguing literary project, presented with a wink and a smile. I enjoy Olivia’s adventurous experiments in literature.＂
-- TAO LIN

Limei is a sensitive, romantic, and artistic girl living all alone in Shanghai. She spends her days making latte art and her nights expressing herself on her personal blog. For now, sadness is her favorite food. But when will her love-life finally find her?!? After drawing the attention of a powerful, handsome, and cruel stranger, the plot thickens...and evaporates into fantasy. What does Limei want from us, what do we want from her, what really happened that night on the rooftop--and how bad can a book really get?

A classic coming-of-age story written somewhere between polaroid and porn popup; proverb, pop lyric, and propaganda, this is a novel for getting stuck in your head. Originally conceived to accompany an installation by Diane Severin Nguyen at the Rockbund Museum in Shanghai, Little Pink Book is a labor of love, a perverse mistranslation, an exercise in humiliation, and a cautionary tale about writing itself. And somewhere in there...lies Limei’s bleeding-pink heart.

OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING’s fiction and essays have appeared in n+1, Heavy Traffic, and The Paris Review, among other magazines. Her first book, Island Time (Expat Press, 2022), about the psycho-geography of Kendall Jenner, is a recursive novella figured as a virtual world. She lives in New York.