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

Roland Kelts on Japan’s reaction to Haruki Murakami not winning this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature: http://nyr.kr/WiEsyk

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

The People’s Republic has sought a Nobel Prize in Literature so avidly and for so long that it became a national psychological fixation—China’s “Nobel complex”.

Evan Osnos on Nobel Prize in Literature-winner, Mo Yan, and China’s “Nobel Complex”: http://nyr.kr/SO0jef