This Nobel laureate is celebrated for his hallucinatory realism, which masterfully merges folk tales, history, and the contemporary. His work often draws comparisons to Kafka or Heller, marked by a distinctive ability to weave epic themes with intimate human experiences. The author's prose is rich and layered, offering readers a profound immersion into Chinese culture and history through compelling narratives.
Mo Yan, a Nobel Laureate, is celebrated for his unique storytelling that blends folk tales, historical elements, and contemporary issues through a lens of hallucinatory realism. His notable works, translated into English by Professor Howard Goldblatt, include titles like The Garlic Ballads and Red Sorghum. His writing often reflects deep cultural insights and explores complex themes, making him a significant figure in modern literature.
Poetry. Translated by Stephen Nashef. The poetry of Ma Yan, born in 1979 in Sichuan province, has garnered increasing attention in China since her untimely death in 2010. She stands out as a poet who is simultaneously playful and fearless in her explorations of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, writing intimate yet arresting poetry of great emotional breadth. Her work delves into questions of gender, mental health, death, desire, physicality and our personal interactions to show how they all shape the raw experience of existence. I NAME HIM ME is the first collection of her poetry to appear in English.
Jintong, his mother, and his eight sisters struggle to survive through the major crises of twentieth century China, which include civil war, invasion by the Japanese, the cultural revolution, and communist rule in the new China.
A contemplative semiautobiographical picture book by Nobel Laureate Mo Yan and illustrated by Hans Christian Anderson Award nominee Zhu Chengliang.
In Frog, Mo Yan turns his attention to the subject of China's one-child policy. A celebrated midwife, skilled at delivering babies in difficult rural circumstances, finds herself at the blunt end of enforcement of the country's controversial one-child policy. Through a complex family story told through letters and narrative forms, Mo explores the emotional and moral toll of state-controlled family planning on a traditional community that places a high value on a large family.
In the fictional Chinese city of Yong'an, an amateur cryptozoologist is commissioned to uncover the stories of its fabled beasts. These creatures live alongside humans in near-inconspicuousness--save their greenish skin, serrated earlobes, and strange birthmarks. Aided by her elusive former professor and his enigmatic assistant, our narrator sets off to document each beast, and is slowly drawn deeper into a mystery that threatens her very sense of self.
Stripped of his possessions and executed as a result of Mao's Land Reform Movement in 1948, benevolent landowner Ximen Nao finds himself endlessly tortured in Hell before he is systematically reborn on Earth as each of the animals in the Chinese zodiac.
The author of Red Sorghum and China's most revered and controversial novelist returns with his first major publication since winning the Nobel Prize In 2012, the Nobel committee confirmed Mo Yan's position as one of the greatest and most important writers of our time. In his much-anticipated new novel, Mo Yan chronicles the sweeping history of modern China through the lens of the nation's controversial one- child policy. "Frog "opens with a playwright nicknamed Tadpole who plans to write about his aunt. In her youth, Gugu--the beautiful daughter of a famous doctor and staunch Communist--is revered for her skill as a midwife. But when her lover defects, Gugu's own loyalty to the Party is questioned. She decides to prove her allegiance by strictly enforcing the one-child policy, keeping tabs on the number of children in the village, and performing abortions on women as many as eight months pregnant. In sharply personal prose, Mo Yan depicts a world of desperate families, illegal surrogates, forced abortions, and the guilt of those who must enforce the policy. At once illuminating and devastating, it shines a light into the heart of communist China.
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.
"This English-language debut from the award-winning Chinese author contains nine short stories in her trademark wit and style based around everyday people facing the challenges of loneliness, emotional and physical displacement and longing."--