Masquerade by Mike Fu
Between Shanghai and New York, a curious story involving an artist and a bartender takes place. Let’s start with Meadow Liu, who is newly single, the aforementioned bartender, and house-sitting for his artist friend Selma. When he stumbles upon a book titled The Masquerade, about a masked ball that took place in Shanghai in the ’30s, suddenly all these weird things start happening. For one, the author’s name is the same as Meadow’s in Chinese (Liu Tian), and over the summer, Meadow encounters strangers speaking riddles, a potentially haunted apartment, and other strange happenings. Then Selma goes missing from her artist residency, and Meadow’s understanding of reality starts to feel like it’s giving way. —Erica Ezeifedi