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STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE
By: Ma Jian
Short Stories from TibetA new collection of short stories, set in Tibet, from one of China's foremost writers...
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
May 2006
104 pages
ISBN: 0374269882
Trade Size (reprint)
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Literature and Fiction | Fiction
Tibet is a land lost in the glare of politics and romanticism, and Ma Jian set out to discover its truths. Stick Out Your Tongue is a revelation: a startlingly vivid portrait of Tibet, both enchanting and horrifying, beautiful and violent, seductive and perverse. In this profound work of fiction, a Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is walking to a sacred mountain to seek forgiveness for sleeping with his daughter, meets a silversmith who has hung the wind-dried corpse of his lover on the wall of his cave, and hears the story of a young female incarnate lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite. In the thin air of the high plateau, the divide between dream and reality becomes confused. When this book was published in Chinese in 1997, the government accused Ma Jian of Γ―ΒΏΒ½harming the fraternal solidarity of the national minorities,Γ―ΒΏΒ½ and a blanket ban was placed on his future work. With its publication in English, including a new afterword by the author that sets the book in its personal and political context, readers get a rare glimpse of Tibet through Chinese eyesΓ―ΒΏΒ½and a window on the imagination of one of ChinaΓ―ΒΏΒ½s foremost writers.
 Media BuzzAll Things Considered - May 31, 2006
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