Today Mo Yan, a Chinese writer, was announced as the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature. I have not read any of his books before but they are pretty cheap right now for kindle and if you have Amazon Prime, two of them are free to borrow.
Red Sorghum: A Novel of China by Mo Yan – only available in Paperback, but his best known book – $10.20
368 pages, 12 of 13 reviews are 4 or 5-star
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.
A legend in China, where is won major literary awards and inspired an Oscar-nominated film, Red Sorghum is a book in which fable and history collide to produce fiction that is entirely new—and unforgettable
The Republic of Wine by Mo Yan – $3.03
336 pages, no reviews
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.
The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan – $3.59 (Free with Prime)
308 pages, 8 of 8 reviews are 4 or 5-star, Lending Enabled
This epic novel of beauty and brutality, set in a landscape at once strange and alluring, paints a portrait of a people whose fierce passions break the rigid confines of their ancient traditions. 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.
Shifu, You’ll Do Anything For a Laugh by Mo Yan - $3.59
150 pages, no reviews, Lending Enabled
In these twelve stories, we see the astonishing range of Mo Yan’s vision – which critics reviewing The Republic of Wine have compared to that of Tolstoy. The stories range from the tragic to the comic, though Mo Yan’s humor is always tinged with a shade of black. They embody, too, the author’s deep and abiding love of his fellow man, equaled only by his intense disdain of bureaucracy and repression. His fiction is never didactic. Satire, fantasy, the supernatural, mystery: all are present in this remarkable, and intensely enjoyable, volume.
Big Brests and Wide Hips by Mo Yan - $9.99 (Free with Prime)
576 pages, no reviews, Lending Enabled
China’s most important contemporary literary voice delivers a portrait of twentieth-century China full of historical sweep and earthy exuberance.In his latest novel, 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 in a beautifully bound collectors edition, this stunning novel is Mo Yan’s searing vision of twentieth-century China.
Life and Death are Wearing Me Out of Mo Yan – $9.32 (Free With Prime)
552 pages, 2 of 2 reviews are 5-star, Lending Enabled
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As always please check to make sure the books are the price you want to pay before you “buy” them. Prices can change quickly. This may be a one day offer. Pick it up quick. If you do buy a book and realize later you have been charged the wrong price for it, here is a guide on how to return a kindle book.
