created a tragedy that was both heart breaking and absurd.

Yan Lianke, never a writer given to coyness, in this satiric allegory
about a community in which innocent greed, selling one’s own blood, was
viciously exploited by heartless crooks. Once the deaths began to

---

Four Books, due out next month in an English translation by Carlos
Rojas, confronts his country’s most shocking taboo, The Great Famine.
It is heavy duty polemical satire at its most candid.

8DICTIONARY_WEB A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by