I Did Not Kill My Husband

Li Xuelian, married to Qin Yuhe, is pregnant with their second child. Happy news? Not in China, with its one-child policy. It is a crime. What is she to do? Her only option is divorcing before the second child is born.

“Once the baby has entered into the household registry, we’ll marry again. The baby will be born after the divorce, so we’ll each have one child when we marry again. No law says couples with one child can’t marry.” Perfect! Except that after the divorce, Qin marries . . . another woman who is expecting a baby. Mad with rage, Li runs to the judge, begging him to declare the divorce a sham so she may remarry and truly divorce the fool!

Liu’s politically charged plot reads like an absurd and hilarious comedy, but couched in his fiction is a harsh indictment of China’s one-child law and a head-on critique of China’s corrupt system. I Did Not Kill My Husband is storytelling and satire of the highest order, sharp-edged and ironic.

Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Howard Goldblatt is a literary translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese fiction from mainland China and Taiwan, including Nobel Prize–winner Mo Yan, five of whose works are published by Arcade (The Garlic Ballads; The Republic of Wine; Big Breasts and Wide Hips; Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out; Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh). He has also translated works by Liu Zhenyun (I Did Not Kill My Husband; The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon; Remembering 1942, which are published by Arcade), Huang Chunming (The Taste of Apples), and Chen Ruoxi (The Execution of Mayor Yin). He taught modern Chinese literature and culture for more than a quarter of a century. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado.