Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh

Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh PDF Author: Mo Yan
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
ISBN: 1611459532
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
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.

Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh

Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh PDF Author: Mo Yan
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
ISBN: 1611459532
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh

Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh PDF Author: Mo Yan
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
ISBN: 9781559706711
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The author of The Republic of Wine presents a new collection of innovative short stories, which range from the tragic to the comic and reflect the author's own disdain for bureaucracy and repression, that includes the title story, which is being made into a major film by acclaimed Chinese director Zhang Yimou.

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out PDF Author: Mo Yan
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing Inc.
ISBN: 1611454271
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 602

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Book Description
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.

Big Breasts and Wide Hips

Big Breasts and Wide Hips PDF Author: Mo Yan
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing Inc.
ISBN: 1611453437
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 636

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Book Description
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.

Pow!

Pow! PDF Author: Mo Yan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780857422217
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
[In this novel by the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature], "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 ... 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."--Publisher's description.

Frog

Frog PDF Author: Mo Yan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698182669
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES TOP BOOK OF 2015 WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK 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.

The Republic of Wine

The Republic of Wine PDF Author: Mo Yan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1611459745
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
In this hypnotic epic novel, Mo Yan, the most critically acclaimed Chinese writer of this generation, takes us on a journey to a conjured province of contemporary China known as the Republic of Wine—a corrupt and hallucinatory world filled with superstitions, gargantuan appetites, and surrealistic events. When rumors reach the authorities that strange and excessive gourmandise is being practiced in the city of Liquorland (so named for the staggering amount of alcohol produced and consumed there), veteran special investigator Ding Gou'er is dispatched from the capital to discover the truth. His mission begins at the Mount Lou Coal Mine, where he encounters the prime suspect—Deputy Head Diamond Jin, legendary for his capacity to hold his liquor. During the ensuing drinking duel at a banquet served in Ding's honor, the investigator loses all sense of reality, and can no longer tell whether the roast suckling served is of the animal or human variety. When he finally wakes up from his stupor, he has still found no answers to his rapidly mounting questions. Worse yet, he soon finds that his trusty gun is missing. Interspersed throughout the narrative—and Ding's faltering investigation—are letters sent to Mo Yan by one Li Yidou, a doctoral candidate in Liquor Studies and an aspiring writer. Each letter contains a story that Li would like the renowned author's help in getting published. However, Li's tales, each more fantastic and malevolent than the last, soon begin alarmingly to resemble the story of Ding's continuing travails in Liquorland. Peopled by extraordinary characters—a dwarf, a scaly demon, a troupe of plump, delectable boys raised in captivity, a cookery teacher who primes her students with monstrous recipes—Mo Yan's revolutionary tour de force reaffirms his reputation as a writer of world standing. Wild, bawdy, politically explosive, and subversive, The Republic of Wine is both mesmerizing and exhilarating, proving that no repressive regime can stifle true creative imagination.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress PDF Author: Sijie Dai
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
ISBN: 037541309X
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
An enchanting literary debut—already an international best-seller. At the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for “re-education.” The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin—as well as, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor. But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn. While ingeniously concealing their forbidden treasure, the boys find transit to worlds they had thought lost forever. And after listening to their dangerously seductive retellings of Balzac, even the Little Seamstress will be forever transformed. From within the hopelessness and terror of one of the darkest passages in human history, Dai Sijie has fashioned a beguiling and unexpected story about the resilience of the human spirit, the wonder of romantic awakening and the magical power of storytelling.

Mo Yan Speaks

Mo Yan Speaks PDF Author: Mo Yan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781621966203
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
Nobel Laureate Mo Yan, whose name literally means "don't speak," is renowned for his fiction, which the Nobel Prize Foundation notes "merges folk tales, history and the contemporary" "with hallucinatory realism." His works include The Garlic Ballads, Red Sorghum, Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, The Republic of Wine, and Big Breasts and Wide Hips (all translated into English by Professor Howard Goldblatt). Just as Mo Yan captivated his audience with his storytelling as a young boy, his speeches on literature in recent years are just as riveting. They provide rare insights into the complex thought processes of one of the most influential writers in the world. Mo Yan's passion for this work comes across clearly in his lectures and speeches, reinforcing the strong emotions his works evoke in his readers. Many of these speeches have been translated into Japanese and Korean, and they are now finally available in English. From the writers who have influenced him to the relationship between his life and his works, these speeches offer an extraordinary window in Mo Yan's world and will help us appreciate his works even more.

The Island of the Day Before

The Island of the Day Before PDF Author: Umberto Eco
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547563892
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 505

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Book Description
A 17th century Italian nobleman is marooned on an empty ship in this “astonishing intellectual journey" by the author of Foucault’s Pendulum (San Francisco Chronicle). In the year 1643, a violent storm in the South Pacific leaves Roberto della Griva shipwrecked—on a ship. Swept from the Amaryllis, he has managed to pull himself aboard the Daphne, anchored in the bay of a beautiful island. The ship is fully provisioned, he discovers, but the crew is missing. As Roberto explores the different cabinets in the hold, he looks back on various episodes from his life: Ferrante, his imaginary evil brother; the siege of Casale, that meaningless chess move in the Thirty Years' War in which he lost his father and his illusions; and the lessons given him on Reasons of State, fencing, the writing of love letters, and blasphemy. In this “intellectually stimulating and dramatically intriguing” novel, Umberto Eco conjures a young dreamer searching for love and meaning; and an old Jesuit who, with his clocks and maps, has plumbed the secrets of longitudes, the four moons of Jupiter, and the Flood (Chicago Tribune).