Bridges and Voice-Overs: Review of Ken Liu’s The Passing of the Dragon

Bill Capossere Under Review:The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories. Ken Liu. Saga Press, September 2026. In his introduction to The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories, Ken Liu tells the reader that “the deep yearning for understanding and the near impossibility of communication permeate this collection”, and says these stories are “an invitation to the reader to step into the unknown […] a shared journey when we’re each locked into our own skulls.” And while the collection often movingly portrays that first part via the characters’ struggles to bridge that which sets them apart from each other, I frequently wished Liu had allowed more space for that “unknown”, for the readers’ own fumbling attempts to understand. Instead, as he does here in so directly spelling out the book’s theses before the reader gets a chance to suss them out on their own, Liu often makes manifestly overt each story’s particular themes. This was, for me, the singularly consistent obstacle to my fully…

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