Dissection of the Moon

Winifred Dongyi Wang

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Have you tried dissecting the moon? It’s no easy job.


Born under the crushing weight of authoritarian parents, a nameless Beijing girl finds fleeting solace in her toxic friendship with Li Zixuan—the illegitimate daughter of a ruthless mining tycoon. But Zixuan’s desperate hunger for parental approval twists into something monstrous when her father weaponizes it, dragging them both into a web of exploitation, power, and depravity. After a fractured upbringing, relocating to New York City did fail to promise her a brighter future - she was brave enough to embark on a dangerous and enticing journey, alluringly glorious…


Spanning from contemporary China’s gilded economic reformation era to the hyper-globalized despair of the 2020s, Dissection of the Moon is a scorching, unflinching coming-of-age novel that prophesied desire, trauma and womanhood. A kaleidoscopic journey in search of identities in the ruins of two worlds. Through love that cuts like punishment, it interrogates the question they never taught you in school: Why does the moon shine full when people are away from each other?

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Author: Winifred Dongyi Wang
Published by:
Accent Edition, 89 5th Avenue 702, New York, NY, USA
Genre: Fiction
Language: English
Year: 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9864753-7-0

Editors: Na Zhong, David Brunson
Copy Editor: David Brunson
Cover Design: Yucheng (Pyrojewel13)
Typesetting: Cao Yi

About the Author

Winifred Dongyi Wang 王东怡 (b. 2002) is a bilingual writer based in Brooklyn, New York.

Born and raised in Beijing, China, she holds a B.A. in History (magna cum laude) and an M.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from New York University. Her writing has appeared in China Book Review, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, West Lake Literary Journal, Shanxi Literature and more.


Dissection of the Moon is her first novel.

Praises

“Dissection of the Moon is a daring bildungsroman on girlhood, sexual violence, substance abuse, and the cost of traversing world powers as a diasporic subject in the first quarter of the 21st century. In the novel, Wang’s lush language exposes the underbellies of Beijing and New York, where “[t]he children of the empire know” but cannot navigate the chaos brought by one’s entanglements. Communication fails not only between languages, but also in the act of sharing a pear. Wang casts a sharp eye on the global network of natural resource extraction, mega events, military bases, corruption, and pandemic, while interrogating what it means to carry a wounded inner child, to be a migrant from the so-called “Third World”. “After that afternoon, my body felt like a vague, unanswered lampshade. […] All I could do was radiate the faint aura of resistance ever since,” Wang writes, evoking our beloved tortured protagonists of Madame Bovary, Good Girl, and Dream of the Red Chamber. Dissection of the Moon is ambitious and accomplished. I cannot wait to read Wang's future work.”

—— Tim Tim Cheng (she/they)
Tim Tim Cheng is a poet, translator, editor, and teacher, currently based between Glasgow and Hong Kong. They wrote The Tattoo Collector (Nine Arches Press, 2024) and Tapping At Glass (Verve Poetry Press, 2023).

“There are writers whom we can't forget the first time we read them or met their young characters in full bloom. Their names come up often as Salinger, Nabokov, Danticat and now Winifred Dongyi Wang. Wang's Dissection of the Moon defied my expectations while meeting every high expectation of a literary debut worth noting and talking about. Its pathos lingers, its honest cast sirens return and its fighting humor girds this portrait of the dilated pain of being born a girl in China before just another young woman New York City swallows whole.”

——Kalisha Buckhanon,
Author of the acclaimed novels Speaking of Summer and Upstate, an American Library Association ALEX Award Winner

“How does libido – delirious, all-consuming, sacred libido – break through the haze of the family romance, Confucian convention, American capitalism, alcohol, cocaine and fentanyl, the insecurities and incoherences of the pain of youth – to affirm us all in the throes of its plenitude and pleasure, bewilderment and ecstasy? How does the moon – that ancient piece of broken rock – lift the light of the sun and make that light into its own, Chang-e finally finding her own voice? Winifred Dongy Wang’s novel The Dissection of the Moon points us in this direction. In “the bloody sticky satin” of the space that exists between Beijing and NYC, Wang takes “a moment that felt like a locked gate between myself and the Chinese language” and extends that moment, the better to explore it in a ferocious American English.”

—— Leonard Schwartz,
author of Flacofolio and Heavy Sublimation

“A vibrant novel from a debut writer who dissects the dislocated feelings between Beijing and New York with a sharp eye and pen.”

——Alec Ash,
Author of Wish Lanterns and The Mountains Are High

Eileen Chang: Love in a Fallen City

Marguerite Duras: The Lover

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

Milan Kundera: Identity

Lin Yi-han: Fang Si-Chi’s First Love Paradise

Lin Zhao: The Flowing Creek

Clarice Lispector: The Hour of the Star

Gabriel García Márquez: Memories of My Melancholy Whores

Yukio Mishima: The Sound of Waves

Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita

Pai Hsien-yung: New Yorkers

Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar

J.D. Salinger: Franny and Zooey

Shen Fu: Six Records of a Floating Life

Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway