Mo Yan Books [epub]

Six Novels By Mo Yan
Requirements: EPub reader, 3.34 MB

About the author
Guan Moye, better known by the pen name Mo Yan (meaning "don't speak" in Chinese), is a Chinese novelist and short story writer. In 2012, Mo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

The Chinese writer Ma Jian has deplored the lack of solidarity and commitment of Mo Yan to other Chinese writers and intellectuals who were punished or detained in violation of their constitutionally protected freedom of expression.

Mo Yan has been criticized for hand-copying Mao Zedong's influential poem Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the speech, as the poem is seen as controversial by many intellectuals.

Genre: Fiction




Red Sorghum
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 Japanese invaders and each other in the turbulent 1930s.

It is narrated by a young man at the end of the cultural revolution who tells the stories of his father, Douguan; his granddad, the most ruthless and infamous bandit and guerrilla commander in the region; and his grandma who fell in love with the commander when he raped her in the sorghum fields, only three days after her arranged marriage.

A legend in China, where it won major literary awards and inspired an Oscar-nominated film directed by Zhang Yimou, Red Sorghum is a book in which fable and history collide to produce fiction that is entirely new—and unforgettable.

The Garlic Ballads
The farmers of Paradise County have been leading a hardscrabble life unchanged for generations. The Communist government has encouraged them to plant garlic, but selling the crop is not as simple as they believed. Warehouses fill up, taxes skyrocket, and government officials maltreat even those who have traveled for days to sell their harvest. A surplus on the garlic market ensues, and the farmers must watch in horror as their crops wither and rot in the fields. Families are destroyed by the random imprisonment of young and old for supposed crimes against the state. The prisoners languish in horrifying conditions in their cells, with only their strength of character and thoughts of their loved ones to save them from madness. Meanwhile, a blind minstrel incites the masses to take the law into their own hands, and a riot of apocalyptic proportions follows with savage and unforgettable consequences. The Garlic Ballads is a powerful vision of life under the heel of an inflexible and uncaring government. It is also a delicate story of love between man and woman, father and child, friend and friend—and the struggle to maintain that love despite overwhelming obstacles.

The Republic of Wine
When special investigator Ding Gou'er hears persistent rumors that there is cannibalism in the province called the Republic of Wine, he goes to learn the truth. Beginning at the Mount Luo Coal Mine, he meets Diamond Jin, legendary for his capacity to hold his liquor and fondness for young human flesh. A banquet is served during which the special investigator, by meal's end in an alcohol-induced stupor, loses all sense of reality. Interspersed are stories sent to Mo Yan himself by Li Yidou (aka Doctor of Liquor Studies), each one more mad than the next. Wild and politically explosive, The Republic of Wine proves that no regime can stifle creative imagination.

Life and Death are Wearing Me Out
Life And Death Are Wearing Me out is a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary. This is politics as pathology. From the start, the reader must be willing to share with Mo Yan the novel's central conceit: that the five main narrators are not humans but animals, albeit ones who speak with sharply modulated human voices…harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny. The revolutionaries' village politics are deadly; sex in the village (whether human or animal) is flamboyant and consuming. Death is unexpected and usually violent. Coincidences of plotting abound. The zaniest events are depicted with deadpan care, and their pathos is caught at countless moments by the fluent and elegant renderings of the veteran translator Howard Goldblatt. One might have thought it impossible, but each animal does comment with its own distinctive voice.

Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh
Acclaimed Chinese writer Mo Yan, the author of The Republic of Wine (2000) and Red Sorghum (1993), describes a childhood of almost unimaginable deprivation under Mao in the preface to this collection of eight hard-hitting yet irresistible short stories. Hunger was so relentless, he writes, they ate coal, proof of the astonishing power of the will to live, the subject of his fable "Iron Child," in which a boy eats iron. Survival and defiance are the underlying themes of each wry, earthy, and incisive tale. In the title story, an exemplary factory worker laid off just a month before retirement figures out an ingenious way to make money by catering to the needs of illicit lovers. In "Abandoned Child," a man rescues a newborn girl who was left to die in a sunflower field, even though he knows his act of mercy will ruin his life. 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.

Big Breasts and Wide Hips
Mo Yan—arguably China’s most important contemporary literary voice—recreates the historical sweep and earthy exuberance of his much acclaimed novel Red Sorghum.

In a country where patriarchal favoritism and the primacy of sons survived multiple revolutions and an ideological earthquake, this epic novel is first and foremost about women, with the female body serving as the book’s central metaphor. The protagonist, Mother, is born in 1900 and married at seventeen into the Shangguan family. She has nine children, only one of whom is a boy—the narrator of the book. A spoiled and ineffectual child, he stands in stark contrast to his eight strong and forceful female siblings.

Mother, a survivor, is the quintessential strong woman who risks her life to save several of her children and grandchildren. The writing is picturesque, bawdy, shocking, and imaginative. The structure draws on the essentials of classical Chinese formalism and injects them with extraordinarily raw and surprising prose. Each of the seven chapters represents a different time period, from the end of the Qing dynasty up through the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, the civil war, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao years. Now available in digital edition, this stunning novel is Mo Yan’s searing vision of twentieth-century China.