The Explosion Chronicles Yan Lianke Carlos Rojas Translation by Yan Lianke, Carlos Rojas (translation) 9780802125828, 0802125824 instant download after payment.

Yan Lianke’s fantastical satire is about a culture so obsessed with an ever-expanding lust for power & money that it has forgotten its soul. 

Translated by Carlos Rojas.

With the Yi River on one side & the Balou Mountains on the other, the village of Explosion was founded a thousand years ago by refugees fleeing a volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era, the name takes on a new significance as the rural community grows explosively from a small village to a vast megalopolis. Behind this rapid expansion are three rival clans linked together by a web of ambition, madness, dishonesty & greed as they seek to create an unrivalled urban superpower.

"The elements of fairy-tale fantasy scattered across The Explosion Chronicles help to sweeten a tough-minded satire ... Even in Carlos Rojas’s robust & well-paced translation, such a diet of supersized wonders can try the reader’s patience. Like his greedy citizens, Mr Yan sometimes fails to put a brake on grotesque excess. Many of the strongest episodes keep to a more domestic scale."  — The Economist

°°° 

Yan Lianke is the author of numerous novels & short-story collections, including Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village & Lenin’s Kisses. The winner of multiple literary awards in China, including the Lao She, Lu Xun & Hua Zhong World Chinese Literature Prize, he was also awarded the Franz Kafka Prize in 2014 & has been shortlisted for both the Man Booker International Prize 2013 & the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Yan teaches at Renmin University in Beijing & the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology.

Carlos Rojas is Professor of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He has translated several of Yan’s novels, including Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, & The Explosion Chronicles.