"In his novels and short stories, Mr. Mo paints sprawling, intricate portraits of Chinese rural life, often using flights of fancy-animal narrators, elements of fairy tales-that evoke the lyrical techniques of South American magical realists." -New York Times "Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of ... Read morethose in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 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" Show Less