Spent Bullets

Terao Tetsuya graduated from National Taiwan University with degrees in Computer Science Information Engineering. He earned a master’s degree in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon and worked as an engineer at Google before turning to writing full-time. His debut short story collection Spent Bullets won Taiwan Literature Awards’ Golden Book Award and the New Bud Award. He lives in Taiwan.Kevin Wang is a Taipei-based writer and Fulbright grantee with an MFA from Columbia University. His co-translation of Chi Ta-wei’s History of Tongzhi Literature is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He has published in Gulf Coast, Circumference, The Margins, and Asymptote.

An instant classic. Spent Bullets whizzes and aims straight at the rotten heart of technological capitalism. Decades from now, or perhaps tomorrow, we will use this book to rouse ourselves from our blind allegiance to meritocracy’s ruthless logic. In these bold, unapologetic stories, an elite group of Taiwanese tech workers grapple with suppressed self-loathing, guilt, and wayward desire. They surrender their moral compass for the easy seductions of refrigerated drinks, and fetishize suicide and kink as their only outlets for self-expression. Bracing, shocking, yet utterly enjoyable, Spent Bullets delivers a reading experience you won’t easily forget. — Anelise Chen, author of CLAM DOWN and SO MANY OLYMPIC EXERTIONSThe endlessly surprising Spent Bullets draws together the most taboo of human desires with the most conventional measures of success. Translator Kevin Wang’s prose shape-shifts between the stickiest details and the clinical clarity of the narrators’ sharp minds, delicately recreating the tension between Terao Tetsuya’s lucid voice and the book’s visceral, existential subject matter. A groundbreaking English-language debut from a Taiwanese author to watch. — Lin King, writer and National Book Award-winning translator of Yang Shuang-zi’s TAIWAN TRAVELOGUEThis perfect, crystalline translation—shaped by Wang’s nimble irony and gloriously musical ear—captures the loneliness, despair, and friendship of young computing geniuses in Taiwan. Their parents are largely absent, as if modern society consumes all: from tech corporations driving aggressive capitalism to the individualism instilled in schools from early childhood. These fragile youth excel within the systems that define them, yet must invent their own absurd humor to endure the meager rewards. Spent Bullets is a savage poem on modern life in a globalized 21st century.  — Michelle Kuo, author of READING WITH PATRICK“Spent Bullets is not always an easy read, and some scenes are genuinely shocking. But Tetsuya's spare, dreamlike prose combined with Kevin Wang's expert translation make it a mesmerizing experience and one that, as Tetsuya writes in the afterword, "triggers both pain and joy.” — Shelf Awareness"Wang’s translation is perfectly calibrated." — Asymptote JournalSpent Bullets succeeds in the humanity that is revealed through its brutality and emotional distance. — World Literature Today