Red Sorghum / Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

Mo Yan, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, has often been called the 'Chinese Faulkner' for his hallucinatory realism and his deep roots in the soil and speech of rural Shandong province. Red Sorghum and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out deploy extravagant narrative invention—myth, folklore, grotesque humor, and sensory overload—to chronicle the upheavals that convulsed the Chinese countryside across the twentieth century. His work transforms local history into universal saga, rendering the violence and vitality of peasant life with unforgettable intensity.

Mo Yan's fiction spans the tumultuous arc from the anti-Japanese resistance through the Communist revolution, the Cultural Revolution, and into the reform era that reshaped China after Mao's death. Zhang Yimou's acclaimed film adaptations brought international visibility to these stories, which offer a ground-level view of how ideological campaigns and political transformations were experienced by ordinary people in rural China.