Mo Yan

While the jury is still out as to whether the Chinese writer Mo Yan, who is said to have been toeing the party line, truly deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature, there is little doubt that his novel “POW!” — with its Rabelaisian...

For lovers of good literary controversy, Salman Rushdie is the gift that keeps on giving. A few months after the publication of Rushdie’s memoir “Joseph Anton,” the New York Review of Books (where they specialize in this sort of thing)...

Salman Rushdie thinks Mo Yan is a patsy of China’s Communist government. I respect Rushdie's work, and his own courage as a defender of artistic freedom. But I'm not sure he's right about Mo Yan. Mo accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature this...

The night John Lennon died, I was at a Bruce Springsteen show in Philadelphia. The next evening, Springsteen would open with a cover of “Twist and Shout,” but on that fateful night, in the  pre-cellphone, pre-Internet era, my friends and I...

STOCKHOLM (AP) — This year's Nobel literature winner Mo Yan, who has been criticized for his cozy relationship with China's Communist Party, defended censorship Thursday as something as necessary as airport security checks. He also suggested he...

Chinese author Mo Yan was announced in October as the recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature; he's in Sweden now and will be presented with the award Monday. It was at a news conference in Stockholm that Mo made his disappointing statements in support...

Few people read more literature that’s written outside their own borders than the French. And if you want to get a really good sense about what’s out there in the vast multilingual world of books, there’s no better place to look than a...

Meteorologists know seasons are predictable. In the weather world, spring is always followed by summer. But the political world is different. Spring can proceed to summer, or it can lead to a sudden onset of winter. That was the case this year in the...

In 2010, before I visited my late father's native village in China's central province of Henan, a friend recommended that I read Yan Lianke's books to prepare for my trip. Yan, one of China's eminent and most controversial novelists and satirists —...

I climb out of the car, step into damp October leaves and stare up at the Logan Square apartment building across the street. A chill rushes up the street. I notice a man standing in the front yard, shuffling back and forth. He does not appear rabid. He...