Search results for ""Author Mo Yan""

In "Change", Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature, personalizes the political and social changes in his country over the past few decades in this novella disguised as autobiography-or vice-versa. Unlike most historical narratives from China, which are pegged to political events, "Change" is a representative of "people's history," a bottom-up rather than top-down view of a country in flux. By moving back and forth in time and focusing on small events and everyday people, Mo Yan breathes life into history by describing the effects of larger-than-life events on the average citizen.

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Today's most revered, feared, and controversial Chinese novelist offers a tour de force in which the real, the absurd, the comical, and the tragic are blended into a fascinating read. The hero-or antihero-of Mo Yan's novel is Ximen Nao, a landowner known for his generosity and kindness and benevolence to his peasants. However, during Mao's Land Reform Movement of 1948, he is not only stripped of his land and worldly possessions but cruelly executed, despite his protestations of innocence. The novel opens in Hell, where Lord Yama, king of the underworld, has Ximen Nao tortured endlessly in order to force a confession of guilt from him. When his efforts remain fruitless, Lord Yama allows Ximen Nao to return to earth, where he is reborn not as a human, but first as a donkey, then a horse, a pig, a monkey, and, finally, the big-headed boy Lan Qiansui. Through the eyes of animal and boy, Ximen Nao takes us on a deliriously unique journey through fifty years of peasant history in China, right to the edge of the new millennium. Here is an absolutely riveting tale that reveals the author's love of a homeland beset by ills inevitable, political, and traditional.

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The peasants of Paradise County in China have been eking out an existence virtually unchanged for hundreds of years, until a glut on the garlic market forces them to watch the crop that is their lifeblood wilt, rot and blacken in the fields - leading them to storm the seat of corrupt Communist officialdom in an apocalyptic riot. Against this heroic backdrop unfold three intricately interwoven tales of love, loyalty and retribution: between man and woman, father and child, friend and friend. Banned in China following Tianamen Square, 'The Garlic Ballads' is a bawdy, mystical and brawling novel that portrays a landscape at once strange and utterly compelling, and a people whose fierce passions overflow the rigid confines of their traditions.

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Frog is a richly complex new novel about China's one-child policy by Mo Yan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2012.Gugu is beautiful, charismatic and of an unimpeachable political background. A respected midwife, she combines modern medical knowledge with a healer's touch to save the lives of village women and their babies.After a disastrous love affair with a defector leaves Gugu reeling, she throws herself zealously into enforcing China's draconian new family-planning policy by any means necessary, be it forced sterilizations or late-term abortions. Tragically, her blind devotion to the Party line spares no one, not her own family, not even herself.Once beloved, Gugu becomes the living incarnation of a reviled social policy violently at odds with deeply-rooted social values. Spanning the pre-revolutionary era and the country's modern-day consumer society, Mo Yan's taut and engrossing examination of Chinese life will be read for generations to come.'Mo Yan deserves a place in world literature. His voice will find its way into the heart of the reader, just as Kundera and Garcia Marquez have' Amy Tan'One of China's leading writers . . . his work rings with refreshing authenticity' Time'His idiom has the spiralling invention of much world literature of a high order, from Vargas Llosa to Rushdie'ObserverTranslated by Howard Goldblatt

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In this novel by the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Mo Van, a benign old monk listens to a prospective novice's tale of depravity, violence, and carnivorous excess while a nice little family drama-in which nearly everyone dies-unfurls. But in this tale of sharp hatchets, bad water, and a rusty WWII mortar, we can't help but laugh. Reminiscent of the novels of dark masters of European absurdism like Gunter Grass, Witold Gombrowicz, or Jakov Lind, Mo Yan's POW! is a comic masterpiece. In this bizarre romp through the Chinese countryside, the author treats us to a cornucopia of cooked animal flesh-ostrich, camel, donkey, dog, as well as the more common varieties. As his dual narratives merge and feather into one another, each informing and illuminating the other, Mo Yan probes the character and lifestyle of modern China. Displaying his many talents, as fabulist, storyteller, scatologist, master of allusion and cliche, and more, POW! carries the reader along quickly, hungrily, and giddily, up until its surprising denouement. Mo Yan has been called one of the great novelists of modern Chinese literature, and the New York Times Book Review has hailed his work as harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny. He writes big, sometimes mystifying, sometimes infuriating, but always entertaining novels-and POW? is no exception.

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Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of staggering horror set against a landscape of gemlike beauty as the Chinese battle both the Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s. As the novel opens, a group of villagers, led by Commander Yu, the narrator's grandfather, prepare to attack the advancing Japanese. Yu sends his 14-year-old son back home to get food for his men; but as Yu's wife returns through the sorghum fields with the food, the Japanese start firing and she is killed. Her death becomes the thread that links the past to the present and the narrator moves back and forth recording the war's progress, the fighting between the Chinese warlords and his family's history.

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Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh is a collection of eight compelling short stories written over the past twenty years: surrealistic political fables, ghost stories, tales of failed and perverse love, and stories about the destructive effects of superstition and ignorance. These stories capture the current concerns of the Chinese: lack of income, famine, and the devastating effects of the one-child policy. One particular get-rich-quick scheme involves an unemployed man who decides to convert an abandoned bus into a venue for private trysts which will enable him to charge lovers by the hour.

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