“To have a Nobel laureate’s take on literature is invaluable—it is all the more the case for Mo Yan, whose name means ‘Don’t Speak’! It is a significant contribution to the literary world that his insights will now be available to English-language readers for the first time in this priceless book, which contains important speeches and lectures by this writer whose impact on world literature continues to grow.” —Professor Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Nobel laureate
"Mo Yan’s public speeches are extremely insightful, not only in respect to his views of written, translated, and read literature but also concerning the role of literature—including its appeal and its limitations—in contemporary society. Mo Yan Speaks enhances our appreciation of his published fiction." —Professor Howard Goldblatt, translator of Mo Yan’s novels and collections; Guggenheim Fellow; and Research Professor, University of Notre Dame
"A truly 'glocal' writer who has one literary foot firmly planted in the soil of his native Gaomi Township and the other tiptoeing into the arena of world literature. They show an author performing a balancing act between his international elite status and the local storytelling tradition present in his work....It is this duality of humble storyteller and Nobel laureate that defines the Mo Yan phenomenon, and it is his playful creation and shaping of this persona that make the speeches in this volume so entertaining...his speeches and lectures are a continuation of Mo Yan’s literary work...The most enjoyable aspects of Mo Yan’s writing are its irreverence, its hyperbole, and its blatant fictionalization of reality, which refuse to be contained by the novel form." —Los Angeles Review of Books
