Mo Yan Speaks: Lectures and Speeches by the Nobel Laureate from China

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. Review "To have a Nobel laureate's take on literature is invaluable-it is all the more the case for Mo Yan, whose name means 'Don't Speak'! It is a significant contribution to the literary world that his insights will now be available to English-language readers for the first time in this priceless book, which contains important speeches and lectures by this writer whose impact on world literature continues to grow." -Professor Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Nobel Laureate"Mo Yan's public speeches are extremely insightful, not only in respect to his views of written, translated, and read literature but also concerning the role of literature-including its appeal and its limitations-in contemporary society. Mo Yan Speaks enhances our appreciation of his published fiction." -Professor Howard Goldblatt, translator of Mo Yan's novels and collections; Guggenheim Fellow; and Research Professor, University of Notre Dame About the Author Mo Yan is the Chinese writer and Nobel laureate whose best-selling books include Red Sorghum, The Garlic Ballads, The Republic of Wine, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Sandalwood Death, Pow!, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, and Frog.Shiyan Xu is Professor of English at Nanjing Normal University and holds a PhD from Nanjing University. She is Deputy Editor-in-Chief for Chinese Arts and Letters, a journal whose aim is to translate works of Chinese literature and introduce them to the English-speaking world. In addition to several journal articles, her previous publications include The "Weather Vane" of Mainstream Theatre: Study of the Pulitzer Plays in the 21st Century. Dr. Xu also translated Eugene O'Neill's newest biography Eugene O'Neill: A Life in Four Acts (Yale University Press, 2014), which was published in 2018 by Nanjing University Press and won the prestigious Purple Mountain Prize in Literary Translation awarded by the Jiangsu Writers' Association.