Purchase
Stick Out Your Tongue
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)
Add to Wish List
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 �harming the fraternal
solidarity of the national minorities,� 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 eyes�and a window on
the imagination of one of China�s foremost writers.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
|