Yan Lianke
Список книг автора Yan LiankeCanción celestial de Balou
Novela corta pero intensa y épica, que funde lo humano, la naturaleza y la muerte. Una fábula sobre el sacrificio personal y el amor de una madre. En una pequeña aldea escondida en los montes Balou, You Sipo, una campesina local, trabaja día y noche para sacar adelante la cosecha mientras desespera por el futuro de sus hijos, a quienes en la aldea todos apodan los cuatro imbéciles You. You Sipo no tiene quien la ayude, solo el fantasma de su marido la acompaña en la búsqueda de una solución a sus problemas. Un día, de la forma más sorprendente, aparece una cura para la maldición familiar, sin embargo, el precio es tan alto e inconcebible que tal vez solo una madre estaría dispuesta a pagarlo. Una historia poderosa, bella y perturbadora sobre el sacrificio que acarrea asumir, hasta sus últimas consecuencias, el compromiso de la sangre, de la familia y del amor cuando nos enfrentamos a las condiciones más adversas. Canción celestial de Balou es Yan Lianke en estado puro.
The Years, Months, Days
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.
Three Brothers
Three Brothers is Yan’s first work of nonfiction to appear in English. It will offer new territory for his American readers, who will begin to understand the real-life man behind his acclaimed novels. There has been a huge surge of interest in Yan Lianke’s writing after Jiayang Fan’s profile appeared in the New Yorker in October 2018. His dissenting voice is all the more important as Xi Jinping’s regime becomes ever more restrictive. Yan Lianke figures each year as a favored candidate for the Nobel Prize and he deserves this highest of literary honors. Yan is expected to travel to New York to be part of the PEN World Voices Festival in 2020, around the publication of this title. PEN are huge supporters of Yan’s work and we are thrilled he should be able to join for the festival for the first time in almost a decade. We are committed to building Yan’s profile and think this is the book that could break him out to a wider audience. Yan’s previous novel, The Day the Sun Died , received extraordinary praise and media attention. He was interviewed on NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” the first time he has done national radio—NPR requested him despite the need for an interpreter and the challenges of setting up the interview in Beijing. Ron Charles wrote in the Washington Post that “Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures,” and the New York Times Book Review raved, “Yan’s subject is China, but he has condensed the human forces driving today’s global upheavals into a bracing, universal vision.” Yan was the first Chinese writer to win the Franz Kafka Prize, and has been twice short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize (most recently for The Four Books ), as well as the Prix Femina Étranger, the Financial Times Oppenheimer Emerging Voices Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and the Man Asian Literary Award. We will follow publication of Three Brothers in 2021 with a novel entitled Hard Like Water , which echoes the themes of Yan’s best-known novel Serve the People . With the brilliant writing and literary power one expects from Yan, it nonetheless invokes a comic, lighter mode in its story of two revolutionaries engaging in an illicit relationship during the Cultural Revolution.
