The Garlic Ballads

Mo Yan is the pen name of Guan Moye, a Chinese novelist and short-story writer born in Gaomi, Shandong province. "Mo Yan" means "don't speak" in Chinese. He rose to international attention with his 1986 novel Red Sorghum, later adapted into the Golden Bear-winning film of the same name. In 2012 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work as a writer "who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary."

Howard Goldblatt is an American literary translator and sinologist, widely regarded as the foremost English-language translator of modern and contemporary Chinese fiction. Born in California in 1939, he first encountered Chinese while serving with the US Navy in Taiwan in the early 1960s, staying on to study at the Mandarin Center before returning to the United States. He taught at San Francisco State University and the University of Colorado Boulder, and was research professor of Chinese at the...