Discovering Fiction

Yan Lianke is the author of Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, The Four Books, and many other novels and story collections. Winner of the Franz Kafka Prize and a two-time finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, Yan teaches at Renmin University in Beijing and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.Carlos Rojas is Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University. He has translated several of Yan’s novels, including Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, and The Explosion Chronicles.

• Translator's Introduction. Creating Reality and Surpassing Realism / Carlos Rojas  ix1. Realism's Four Levels of Truth  12. Zero Causality  353. Full Causality  514. Partial Causality  595. Inner Causality  836. Mythorealism  99Appendix: Chinese Authors and Works  125Notes  129Bibliography  133Index  137

"Yan’s commentaries on the realist canon emerging over the last several hundred years are consistently insightful and often strikingly illuminating, as in his assessments of how the strongest writers, from Defoe to Turgenev and beyond, have continually shifted readers’ understanding of what counts as reality. . . . A sometimes dense but always discerning consideration of how truth emerges across an impressive array of global literature." (Kirkus Reviews) "A thought-provoking look at the state of literature, and how it came to pass." (Publishers Weekly)