The Years, Months, Days: Two Novellas - Tapa blanda

ACCLAIM FOR YAN LIANKE -One of China's eminent and most controversial novelists and satirists.- --Chicago Tribune WINNER OF THE KAFKA PRIZE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FINALIST (twice) SHORTLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES OPPENHEIMER EMERGING VOICES AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN ASIAN LITERARY PRIZE PRAISE FOR THE EXPLOSION CHRONICLES -Charting the arc from unprincipled Communism to lawless capitalism, Yan employs hyperbolic touches that facetiously evoke legend.- --New Yorker -[Yan's] fiction has lampooned some of the darkest moments in Chinese history . . . The formal inventiveness of The Explosion Chronicles is impressive and its fictional universe vividly drawn . . . I can think of few better novelists than Yan, with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth.- --New York Times Book Review -A rip-roaring Swiftian satire from a contemporary Chinese master . . .Yan Lianke, one of China's most forthright and versatile novelists, enlists extravagant comedy and far-fetched fable to propel his critique of a society where 'power and money have colluded to steal people's souls.'- --Economist -No contemporary satirist has had more experience with China's censors than Yan Lianke . . . This darkly absurd history trucks freely with the fantastic . . . but many of the more brazen events are taken straight from the news . . . Yan's burlesque of a nation driven insane by money is equally a satire of some of the excesses of the Chinese Revolution.- --Wall Street Journal -A satire of ambition.- --Sacramento News -An epic page-turner . . . a multi-layered marvel . . . combining unflinching observation, stinging satire . . . Yan's mesmerizing ability to pull readers into this raw, subversive, not completely fictional world will continue to build his international audiences. Mo Yan was the first Chinese national to be awarded the Nobel for Literature; Yan just might be next.- --Library Journal (starred review) -Yan returns with renewed vigor to the job of lampooning communist orthodoxy, capitalist ambition, and 'contemporary China's incomprehensible absurdity' . . . [The Explosion Chronicles] has the absurdist feel of an Ionesco or Durrenmatt piece, though without any of the heavy-handed obviousness. Indeed, his satire is careful and crafty . . . it can be read as a kind of Swiftian satire . . . Brilliant.- --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Over the last decade, Yan Lianke has been continually heralded as one of the "best contemporary Chinese writers" (The Independent) and "one of the country's fiercest satirists" (The Guardian). Among many awards and honors, he has been twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize and he was awarded the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize for his impressive body of work. Now, for the first time, his two most acclaimed novellas are being published in English. "Timeless" and "marvelous" (Asian Review of Books), Marrow is a haunting story of a widow who goes to extremes to provide a normal life for her four physically and mentally disabled children. When she finds out that bones "the closer from kin the better" can cure their illnesses and prevent future generations from the same fate, she feeds them a medicinal soup made from the bones of her dead husband. But after running out of bones, she resorts to a measure that only a mother can take. A luminous, moving fable, The Years, Months, Days--a bestselling classic in China and winner of the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize--tells of an elderly man who stays in his small village after a terrible drought forces everyone to leave. Unable to make the grueling march through the mountains, he becomes the lone inhabitant, along with a blind dog. Tending to a single ear of corn, and fending off the natural world from overtaking the village, every day is a victory over death. With touches of the fantastical, these two novellas--masterpieces of the form--reflect the universality of mankind's will to live, live well, and live with purpose.