Arcade Classics

In his latest novel, Mo Yan-arguably China's most important contemporary literary voice-recreates the historical sweep and earthy exuberance of his much acclaimed novel Red Sorghum. In a country where patriarchal favoritism and the primacy of sons survived multiple revolutions and an ideological earthquake, this epic novel is first and foremost about women, with the female body serving as the book's central metaphor. The protagonist, Mother, is born in 1900 and married at seventeen into the Shangguan family. She has nine children, only one of whom is a boy-the narrator of the book. A spoiled and ineffectual child, he stands in stark contrast to his eight strong and forceful female siblings. Mother, a survivor, is the quintessential strong woman who risks her life to save several of her children and grandchildren. The writing is picturesque, bawdy, shocking, and imaginative. The structure draws on the essentials of classical Chinese formalism and injects them with extraordinarily raw and surprising prose. Each of the seven chapters represents a different time period, from the end of the Qing dynasty up through the Japanese invasion in the 1930s, the civil war, the Cultural Revolution, and the post-Mao years. Now in a beautifully bound collector's edition, this stunning novel is Mo Yan's searing vision of twentieth-century China.

In this wonderful, vigorously contemporary translation, Craig Hill has captured the liveliness, satiric wit, and poetic beauty that made Jean de la Fontaine famous during his lifetime and his Fables celebrated as a masterwork of world literature ever since. Despite la Fontaine’s deceptively modest claim that all he intended was to put the moral tales of Aesop and other ancient fabulists into poetry for the pleasure of Louis XIV’s young son, his real accomplishment, as later generations have understood, was holding a mirror up to the society of his day and, in the process, fashioning a work that has become a classic. Borrowing from a variety of sources, la Fontaine gave the hitherto mute animals in ancient fables the power of speech. Backstabbing politicians, brainless nincompoops, charlatans, clueless heads of state, egomaniacs, empty-headed celebrities, foolish investors, gluttons, liars, penny–pinchers, self-important blowhards, and wastrels—these are the targets of la Fontaine’s pen.