The Explosion Chronicles - Softcover

Yan Lianke is the author of numerous short story collections and novels, including The Four Books, Lenin’s Kisses, Serve the People!, and Dream of Ding Village. Among many honors, he was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize as well as two of China’s most prestigious literary honors, the Lu Xun prize and the Lao She award.

“[Yan Lianke’s] fiction has lampooned some of the darkest moments in Chinese history . . . In this latest work, however, Yan shifts his irreverent gaze from the past to the present and toward projections of the future, taking stock of China’s vertiginous economic rise and the astonishing dissolution of its collective social conscience . . . As with Yan’s previous novels, the formal inventiveness of The Explosion Chronicles is impressive and its fictional universe vividly drawn . . . I can think of few better novelists than Yan, with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth.” ―Jiayang Fan, New York Times Book Review
“Charting the arc from unprincipled Communism to lawless capitalism, Yan employs hyperbolic touches that facetiously evoke legend.” ―New Yorker
“A rip-roaring Swiftian satire from a contemporary Chinese master . . . Yan Lianke, one of China’s most forthright and versatile novelists, enlists extravagant comedy and far-fetched fable to propel his critique of a society where ‘power and money have colluded to steal people’s souls’ . . . The reader slips into a literary China of poetry and mystery that flourished long before the boom.” ―Economist
“This darkly absurd history trucks freely with the fantastic . . . but many of the more brazen events are taken straight from the news . . . Yan’s burlesque of a nation driven insane by money is equally a satire of some of the excesses of the Chinese Revolution.” ―Wall Street Journal
“A satire of ambition.” ―Sacramento News
“Yan returns with renewed vigor to the job of lampooning communist orthodoxy, capitalist ambition, and ‘contemporary China's incomprehensible absurdity’ . . . [The Explosion Chronicles] has the absurdist feel of an Ionesco or Dürrenmatt piece, though without any of the heavy-handed obviousness . . . It can be read as a kind of Swiftian satire . . . Brilliant.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“An epic page-turner . . . a multi-layered marvel . . . combining unflinching observation [and] stinging satire . . . Yan’s mesmerizing ability to pull readers into this raw, subversive, not completely fictional world will continue to build his international audiences.” ―Library Journal (starred review)