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Mo Yan, China's most critically acclaimed author, has changed the
face of his country's contemporary literature with such daring and
masterly novels as Red Sorghum, The Garlic Ballads, and The
Republic of Wine. In this collection of eight astonishing
stories--the title story of which has been adapted to film by the
award-winning director of Red Sorghum Zhang Yimou--Mo Yan shows why
he is also China's leading writer of short fiction.
His passion for writing shaped by his own experience of almost
unimaginable poverty as a child, Mo Yan uses his talent to expose
the harsh abuses of an oppressive society. In these stories he
writes of those who suffer, physically and spiritually, under its
yoke: the newly unemployed factory worker who hits upon an
ingenious financial opportunity; two former lovers revisiting their
passion fleetingly before returning to their spouses; young couples
willing to pay for a place to share their love in private; the
abandoned baby brought home by a soldier to his unsympathetic wife;
the impoverished child who must subsist on a diet of iron and
steel; the young bride willing to go to any length to escape an
odious, arranged marriage. Never didactic, Mo's fiction ranges from
tragedy to wicked satire, rage to whimsy, magical fable to harsh
realism, from impassioned pleas on behalf of struggling workers to
paeans to romantic love.
"Brilliant, lyrical, and bawdy."—The San Francisco Chronicle. Red Sorghum chronicles the chaotic years before the first World War, when China warred with Japan.
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.
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.
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.
This powerful novel by Mo Yan - one of contemporary China's most
famous and prolific writers - is both a stirring love story and an
unsparing critique of political corruption during the final years
of the Qing Dynasty, China's last imperial epoch. Sandalwood Death
is set during the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1901) - an anti-imperialist
struggle waged by North China's farmers and craftsmen in opposition
to Western influence. Against a broad historical canvas, the novel
centers on the interplay between its female protagonist, Sun
Meiniang, and the three paternal figures in her life. One of these
men is her biological father, Sun Bing, an opera virtuoso and a
leader of the Boxer Rebellion. As the bitter events surrounding the
revolt unfold, we watch Sun Bing march toward his cruel fate, the
gruesome ""sandalwood punishment,"" whose purpose, as in
crucifixions, is to keep the condemned individual alive in
mind-numbing pain as long as possible. Filled with the sensual
imagery and lacerating expressions for which Mo Yan is so
celebrated, Sandalwood Death brilliantly exhibits a range of
artistic styles, from stylized arias and poetry to the antiquated
idiom of late Imperial China to contemporary prose. Its starkly
beautiful language is here masterfully rendered into English by
renowned translator Howard Goldblatt.
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.
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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POW! (Paperback)
Mo Yan; Translated by Howard Goldblatt
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R463
Discovery Miles 4 630
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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In this novel by the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Mo Yan,
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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