Winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature
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.
