Yan Lianke is a world-renowned author of novels, short stories, and essays whose provocative and nuanced writing explores the reality of everyday life in contemporary China. In Sound and Silence, Yan compares his literary project to a blind man carrying a flashlight whose role is to help others perceive the darkness that surrounds them. Often described as China’s most censored author, Yan reflects candidly on literary censorship in contemporary China. He outlines the Chinese state’s project of national amnesia that suppresses memories of past crises and social traumas. Although being banned in China is often a selling point in foreign markets, Yan argues that there is no requisite correlation between censorship and literary quality. Among other topics, Yan also examines the impact of American literature on Chinese literature in the 1980s and 1990s. Encapsulating his perspectives on life, writing, and literary history, Sound and Silence includes an introduction by translator Carlos Rojas and an afterword by Yan.

Yan Lianke is the author of Discovering Fiction, also published by Duke University Press, as well as Hard Like Water, The Day the Sun Died, The Explosion Chronicles, and many other books. 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 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Carlos Rojas is Professor of Modern Chinese Cultural Studies at Duke University and translator of several of Yan’s novels.

Acknowledgments  vii
Translator’s Introduction / Carlos Rojas  ix
1. He Who Has Been Selected by Heaven and Life to Appreciate Darkness  1
2. National Amnesia and Literary Memory  9
3. The Abjection of Alt-China and Its Literature  20
4. The Wild Child That Is American Literature  34
5. My Thoughts on Literary Censorship and Controversy  48
6. My Literary Review Book  64
7. The Distinctiveness of Writing in China  76
8. Fear and Betrayal Have Accompanied Me throughout My Life  90
9. Writing under a Sky of Concentrated Power and Relative Laxity  107
10. Living without Dignity but Writing with Honor  121
11. My Ideal Is Simply to Write a Novel That I Think Is Good  133
12. A Village’s China and Literature  148
Afterword. Ripping Open the Dreamscape  165
Biographies  169
Index  171