Stone of Madness (English-Chinese Edition): Benjamin Labatut on Reason, Madness & the Fiction That Became Real

The author, Benjamín Labatut, wrote When We Cease to Understand the World — a book that stunned readers and critics worldwide, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize, and was named a New York Times Top 10 Book of the Year.

The Stone of Madness is Labatut’s next short, sharp strike. The Chinese section runs only a few dozen pages, but it carries two incredibly dense pieces. One starts from Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and Philip K. Dick’s “multiple realities,” asking why the absurd imaginings of science fiction are becoming real in the age of AI. The other takes a small painting by Hieronymus Bosch and drives at an old, dangerous question: could the people we call “mad” actually be closer to some kind of truth than the “sane” rest of us?

This edition is laid out bilingually — Chinese on one side, English on the other — so you can read both without losing the original tone to translation. Translator Geng Hui’s Chinese rendering is clean and precise, keeping Labatut’s cold, unsettling, impossible-to-put-down cadence intact.

Who it’s for:

• Readers who finished When We Cease to Understand the World and want more Labatut

• Anyone drawn to the crossroads of philosophy, science, and literature

• Chinese or English learners who want a short but intellectually serious bilingual text to read side by side

• People who like thin books — but not shallow ones