Lenin's Kisses

"Yan Lianke is one of China’s most interesting writers and a master of imaginative satire"

A hugely ambitious political fable ... you will be rewarded, both with a great ripping yarn, but also the kind of raw literary qualities that can only emanate from an non-European tradition ... Yan Lianke maintains an utterly uncompromising stance. There is nothing magical about Yan Lianke's realism. It's better to think of categories like labyrinthine, or grotesque, or of satire mixed with sadism: the unflinching eye that nevertheless leaves you blinking with the whirling absurdities of the human condition -- Xiaolu Guo Independent Yan, one of China's most successful writers, is still gaining attention abroad, but this story of a village that decides to buy Lenin's corpse is Yan at the peak of his absurdist powers. He writes in the spirit of the dissident writer Vladimir Voinovich, who observed that "reality and satire are the same" -- Evan Osnos New Yorker, Best Books of 2012 Yan's postmodern cartoon of the Communist dream caving to run-amok capitalism is fiendishly clever New York Times Book Review A satirical masterpiece Kirkus Review, Best 100 Books of of 2012 Lenin's Kisses is a grand comic novel, wild in spirit and inventive in technique. It's a rhapsody that blends the imaginary with the real, raves about the absurd and the truthful, inspires both laughter and tears... The publication of this magnificent work in English should be an occasion for celebration. Ha Jin, author of Waiting