The farmers of Paradise County have been leading a hardscrabble life unchanged for generations. The Communist government has encouraged them to plant garlic, but selling the crop is not as simple as they believed. Warehouses fill up, taxes skyrocket, and government officials maltreat even those who have traveled for days to sell their harvest. A surplus on the garlic market ensues, and the farmers must watch in horror as their crops wither and rot in the fields. Families are destroyed by t...

One of the Nobel Prize Winners in LiteratureIdeal for fans of Chinese Playground, We Are Party People, Death of Me, Skate with Me, A Farmer’s Life for Me, and similar worksWritten by today’s most revered, controversial, and feared Chinese novelistMo Yan’s Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is a remarkable story. The absurd, real, comical, and tragic are combined into a fantastic read. The hero—or antihero—is Ximen Nao, a landowner k...

Mo Yan, China’s most critically acclaimed author, has changed the face of his country’s contemporary literature with such daring and masterly novels as Red Sorghum, The Garlic Ballads, and The Republic of Wine. In this collection of eight astonishing stories—the title story of which has been adapted to film by the award-winning director of Red Sorghum Zhang Yimou—Mo Yan shows why he is also China’s leading writer of short fiction.His passion for writing shaped by his own experience...

December 1937. The Japanese have taken Nanking. A group of terrified schoolgirls hides in the compound of an American church. Among them is Shujuan, through whose thirteen-year-old eyes we witness the shocking events that follow.Run by Father Engelmann, an American priest who has been in China for many years, the church is supposedly neutral ground in the war between China and Japan. But it becomes clear the Japanese are not obeying international rules of engagement. As they pour t...

There are only two people in the world that I truly hate. One of them is unpacking his toothbrush in my bathroom, and the other one is texting me to find out what color my panties are.Pathetic, I know. I’m a romance novelist caught between the man I used to love, and the one who wants to destroy my career. Well - maybe “destroy” is too strong of a word. But there’s still no excuse for why I started a secret cyber-affair with a snarky reviewer who likes to rip my books apart. Yes, h...

A “visual tour through the under-appreciated chemical beauty that surrounds us”—with astonishing photographs of the scientific processes that create snowflakes, bubbles, flames, and other natural wonders (WIRED)Chemistry is not just about microscopic atoms doing inscrutable things; it is the process that makes flowers and galaxies. We rely on it for bread-baking, vegetable-growing, and producing the materials of daily life. In stunning images and illuminat...

Discover Lone Star Cowboy League: Multiple Blessings from Love Inspired® Historical! This sampler includes 3 excerpts, giving you a sneak peek at abandoned triplets finding a home and bringing hearts together in Texas. Also learn more about the characters with the fast facts included inside!THE RANCHER’S SURPRISE TRIPLETSLone Star Cowboy League: Multiple Blessingsby Linda FordAfter stumbling on triplet orphans abandoned at the county fair, ran...

A Father in the MakingBusy Texas farmer Quinn Tucker is used to raising crops, not children. So when four nieces and nephews are left in his care, it's not long before he realizes they need a mother. But his search for a wife leads to the least likely woman for illiterate Quinn-schoolmarm Helen McKenna.City girl Helen has been told she'll never have children-and, it seems, a husband. So she jumps at the chance to be a mother to Quinn's little famil...

"Yan is one of those rare geniuses who finds in the peculiar absurdities of his own culture the absurdities that infect all cultures." — The Washington PostFrom the Kafka Prize winner and two-time Booker Prize finalist, this is a gripping and bitingly satirical story of ambition and betrayal, following two young communist revolutionaries whose forbidden love sets them apart from their traditionally minded village as the Cultural Revolution sweeps China.

From the Franz Kafka Prize–winning author. "Full of love, sorrow, and tenderness . . . a deeply heartfelt account of his family in the 1960s and 70s." —Xiaolu Guo, award-winning author of Nine ContinentsWith lyricism and deep emotion, Yan Lianke chronicles the extraordinary lives of his father and uncles, as well as his own during the Cultural Revolution. Living in a remote village, Yan's parents are so poor that they can only afford to use wheat flour on N...

SECOND CHANCE REUNIONIt's been five years since Adelaide Harper broke Chris Johansen's heart-and their long-distance engagement. But when she steps off a train in Peppin, Texas, and strolls back into Chris's life, he can't help but panic. Because to avoid his parents' plan to arrange a marriage for him, he's let his family believe he and Adelaide are still engaged.Adelaide is facing her own troubles with a matchmaking mama and a parade of aggravati...

In this hypnotic epic novel, Mo Yan, the most critically acclaimed Chinese writer of this generation, takes us on a journey to a conjured province of contemporary China known as the Republic of Wine—a corrupt and hallucinatory world filled with superstitions, gargantuan appetites, and surrealistic events. When rumors reach the authorities that strange and excessive gourmandise is being practiced in the city of Liquorland (so named for the staggering amount of alcohol produced and consumed ...