In this week’s issue, read Nobel Prize-winner Mo Yan’s story “Bull”. Here, a conversation with the author’s translator, Howard Goldblatt. 

New fiction in this week’s issue from Nobel Prize-winner, Mo Yan.

In 2005, Mo Yan, who today won the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote a remarkable brief memoir for Le Monde (available to the newspaper’s subscribers) in which he described what he calls “an event that I’ve never forgotten and that remains tied to today’s political and social life”—and it was a movie that he saw in 1973, “The Flower Girl,” made in North Korea, directed by Kim Jong-il, based on an opera that was written by Kim Il-sung. 

- Richard Brody

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In his 2005 review for The New Yorker of Mo’s novel “Big Breasts and Wide Hips,” John Updike was struck by the unique mix of “brutal incident, magic realism, nature description, and far-flung metaphor” in Mo’s work, and by the wry, freewheeling forthrightness of the prose. “The Chinese novel, perhaps,” he writes, “had no Victorian heyday to teach it decorum,” giving Mo the freedom to craft “indulgent and hyperactive metaphors”…

Joshua Rothman looks back at John Updike’s 2005 review of Mo Yan’s novel: http://nyr.kr/PpXwJ6