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 Etranger. 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 Paramo 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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