Change

Mo Yan

Translated by Howard Goldblatt

 

4.25 x 7 inches, 108pp. April 2012

ISBN : 9781906497484

Rs  275.00 (HB)
$15.00 (HB)
£10.50 (HB)

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In Change, Mo Yan—China’s foremost novelist—personalizes the political and social changes in his country over the past few decades in a 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, Yan breathes life into history by describing the effects of larger-than-life events on the average citizen.

 

Praise for Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh

'If China has a Kafka, it may be Mo Yan. Like Kafka, Yan has the ability to examine his society through a variety of lenses, creating fanciful, Metamorphosis-like transformations or evoking the numbing bureaucracy and casual cruelty of modern governments.' —Publishers Weekly.

 

'As shrewd as he is captivating, Mo Yan is dedicated to explicating the suffering and resilience of ordinary people and to telling a darn good story.'—Booklist

 

 

Mo Yan has been described as 'one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers'. His works have been translated into more than a dozen languages, including English, German and French and his honours include the Kiriyama Prize Notable Books (for Big Breasts and Wide Hips, 2005), Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize XVII(2006), Man Asian Literary Prize nominee (for Big Breasts and Wide Hips, 2007), Newman Prize for Chinese Literature (for Sontag, 2009) and the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2012.

 

Howard Goldblatt is research professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame. He has published English translations of more than 30 novels and story collections by writers from China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. He has also authored and edited half a dozen books on Chinese literature.

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