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Mo Yan has published dozens of short stories and novels in Chinese. His other works include Pow!; The Garlic Ballads; The Republic of Wine; Shifu; You'l Do Anything for a Laugh; Big Breasts & Wide Hips; and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Howard Goldblatt is research professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame. Founding editor of Modern Chinese Literature, he has contributed essays and articles to the Washington Post, Times, Time, World Literature Today, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.

"In his novels and short stories, Mr. Mo paints sprawling, intricate portraits of Chinese rural life, often using flights of fancy-animal narrators, elements of fairy tales-that evoke the lyrical techniques of South American magical realists." -New York Times "Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition."-Nobel Committee for Literature "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"