Yan Lianke is the author of numerous story collections and novels, including The Day the Sun Died; The Years, Months, Days; The Explosion Chronicles; The Four Books; Lenin's Kisses; Serve the People!; and Dream of Ding Village. Among many accolades, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, he was twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, and he has been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, the Man Asian Literary Prize, and the Prix Femina Étranger. He has received two of China's most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun Prize and the Lao She Award.
Praise for Three BrothersAn Amazon Best Book of the Month
(Memoir)"This memoir of growing up during the Cultural Revolution
focuses on Yan's memories of his family: his father, who toiled in
their field; his elder uncle, who sold home-made socks and wore a
jacket covered with patches; and his younger uncle, thought to be
the one who got away, who worked long shifts at a cement factory.
Yan recalls both the immense pleasure brought by simple
luxuries--candies, sweet potatoes, a shiny polyester shirt--and the
initial allure of the city, where life seemed to have meaning
beyond the repetition of the harvest and building tile-roofed
houses for one's children to get married in. He left, eventually
settling in Beijing, only to yearn for his ancestral land."--New
Yorker"An elegiac tribute to [Yan's] father's generation, who
labored for a lifetime to build traditional houses for their sons
and provide dowries for their daughters. They succeeded, only to
have their world swept away by rapid change . . . The land could do
without him, he reflects, but he could not do without the land.
'Without that village, ' he laments, 'I would be nothing.'"--Isabel
Hilton, Financial Times"A moving story of family, loss, and
self-discovery . . . Lianke also explores his own path toward
becoming a writer, which makes for some of this book's most
memorable moments."--Tobias Carroll, Words without Borders"This
engaging book asks readers to consider the nature of life and
death, city versus country, and the impact generations can have on
each other."--Winnipeg Free Press"If Yan's memoir owes its
existence to family, it is because every blessing in Yan's life
owed its existence to family, as Yan's unflinching self-examination
demonstrates plainly . . . Yan is concerned with death in this
arresting work, not only the death of loved ones, but of a whole
moment in Chinese history that, for ever more young people, is
incomprehensible and even non-existent . . . As a peasant who was
able to write himself out of the fields and into international
celebrity, Yan poignantly shows that the most effective antidote to
death is gratitude."--Full Stop"Three Brothers includes length
meditations on fate, change, happiness, and what Yan calls 'life'
as opposed to 'living' . . . What breathes life into these themes
and ideas is Yan's impressionistic form of family biography . . .
By collapsing time, this almost Proustian method frequently brings
both Yan and the reader face to face with himself."--South China
Morning Post"A leading Chinese novelist, famous for sharp satire,
tells the story of his family's hardscrabble life with surprising
tenderness . . . Complicated and powerful."--Booklist (starred
review)"Throughout the book, Yan depicts his provincial relatives
with enormous heart and respect, acknowledging their sacrifices in
a dark yet poignant meditation on grief and death . . . A memoir
stepped in metaphor and ultimately tremendously moving."--Kirkus
Reviews"Full of love, sorrow, and tenderness, Yan Lianke's memoir
offers a deeply heartfelt account of his family in the 1960s and
70s. Three Brothers is a must read for anyone who wants to
understand post-Mao China and a new opportunity to experience more
of what this extraordinary author conveys to us with his vivid and
poetic style."--Xiaolu Guo, author of Nine ContinentsPraise for The
Day the Sun Died New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly
Named a Best Fiction in Translation Selection by Kirkus Reviews
An Amazon Best Book of the Month "China's most controversial
novelist . . . [A] preternatural gift for metaphor spills out of
him unbidden."--Jiayang Fan, New Yorker"A poetic nightmare . . .
The Day the Sun Died is set in the course of a single, perpetual
summer day and night in which the inhabitants of a small village in
China rise from their slumber and sleepwalk through town."--NPR,
"Weekend Edition" "Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in
the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that
infect all cultures . . . [The Day the Sun Died is] the creepiest
book I've read in years: a social comedy that bleeds like a zombie
apocalypse . . . Yan's understated wit runs through these pages
like a snake through fallen leaves . . . Invokes that fluid dream
state in which everything represents something else, something
deeper . . . A wake-up call about the path we're on."--Ron Charles,
Washington Post "Gripping . . . Yan's fable, joining a long lineage
of so-called 'records of anomalies' in Chinese literature, forces
readers to reflect on the side of the world that is 'too absurd,
too cruel and too unpleasant.' . . . Yan's subject is China, but he
has condensed the human forces driving today's global upheavals
into a bracing, universal vision."--Julian Gewirtz, New York Times
Book Review "Revelatory . . . Disgust and hope fight it out, as the
reader sits ringside."--New York "Floats between surrealism,
sci-fi, horror, and absurdism, while never letting go of its
satirical eye. Yet the language and structure of the novel reads
more like Samuel Beckett or James Joyce than it does The Handmaid's
Tale . . . Bears the largesse and cadence of myth, but it is also
the story of a family, told by a simple boy of fourteen. Yan's
physical descriptions can be rich and specific, grounded in
realism, but also far-fetched and steeped in surprising metaphor .
. . No matter where we live, this is our story, too, or could be,
if things don't change."--Ploughshares "By turns terrifying,
violent, satirical, and darkly funny."--South China Morning
Post"Yan trains his fantastical, satiric eye on China's policy of
forced cremation in this chilling novel about the 'great
somnambulism' that seizes a rural town . . . A riveting, powerful
reading experience."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Yan's
novel belongs in the company of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo and even
James Joyce's Ulysses."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Dark and
sinister . . . In his unflinching satire, Lianke shows an
incredible mastery of words, both brilliantly humorous and offbeat,
making this novel a gripping read."--Booklist "This exuberant but
sinister fable confirms its author as one of China's most audacious
and enigmatic novelists . . . His writing--resourcefully translated
by Carlos Rojas--feels both ancient and modern, folkloric and
avant-garde . . . [Lianke] seeds his reader's imagination, and his
outlandish fantasia germinates many varieties of
interpretation."--Economist "Explores with a strange elegance and
dark, masterful experiment these twin themes of night and death,
dreams and reality . . . A brave and unforgettable novel, full of
tragic poise and political resonance, masterfully shifting between
genres and ways of storytelling, exploring the ways in which
history and memory are resurrected, how dark, private desires seep
or flood out."--Irish Times "The Day the Sun Died takes on Xi
Jinping's 'Chinese dream'--a promise to restore China to a position
of global importance . . . Yan's disgust for his country's moral
degradation is unmistakable: a predatory ruling party exploiting
its people even in death."--Guardian "In this novel, dreams suggest
that the present is still haunted by nightmares . . .
Remarkable."--Scotsmam "Powerful . . . Poignant and
unsettling."--Mail on Sunday "Gloriously defiant . . .
Sophisticated in the layered, gothic excesses of its allegorical
zombie narrative . . . A powerful, captivating work of art."--South
China Morning Post Praise for Yan Lianke Winner of the Franz Kafka
Prize
Two-Time Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize "One of
China's eminent and most controversial novelists and
satirists."--Chicago Tribune "His talent cannot be ignored."--New
York Times "China's foremost literary satirist . . . He deploys
offbeat humor, anarchic set pieces and surreal imagery to shed new
light on dark episodes from modern Chinese history."--Financial
Times "[Yan is] criticizing the foundations of the Chinese state
and the historical narrative on which it is built, while still
somehow remaining one of its most lauded writers."--New Republic
"One of China's most successful writers . . . He writes in the
spirit of the dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich, who observed
that 'reality and satire are the same.'"--New Yorker "There is
nothing magical about Yan Lianke's realism . . . [with his]
unflinching eye that nevertheless leaves you blinking with the
whirling absurdities of the human condition."--Independent "One of
China's most important--and certainly most fearless--living
writers."--Kirkus Reviews "The work of the Chinese author Yan
Lianke reminds us that free expression is always in contention--to
write is to risk the hand of power."--Guardian
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