Change

Mo Yan

Change

Mo Yan

Distributed for Seagull Books

Translated by Howard Goldblatt
117 pages | 4 1/4 x 7 | © 2010
What Was Communism?
Paper $12.95 ISBN: 9780857421609 Published February 2013 World sales rights except India
E-book $10.00 ISBN: 9780857421616 Published October 2012 World sales rights except India

In Change, Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature, personalizes the political and social changes in his country over the past few decades in this 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, Mo Yan breathes life into history by describing the effects of larger-than-life events on the average citizen.

“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 García Márquez, 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, on Shifu: You'll Do Anything for a Laugh
Contents

A novella in eight chapters by Mo Yan

Translated by Howard Goldblatt

Volume 5 in the What Was Communism? Series edited by Tariq Ali

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