Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China offers profound reflections on the poetics and politics, ethics and aesthetics of writing fiction in China’s “new epoch” when state ideology and literary imagination contest and conflict. David Der-wei Wang shows us that storytelling, as transgression, transmigration, and transillumination, can speak back to and subvert the state’s mandate for “telling [only] a good story of China.” This book is a timely observation on contemporary China and its literature. It is necessary, and it inspires.