A Dictionary of Maqiao

From the daring imagination of one of China's greatest living novelists comes a work of startling power and originalitythe story of a young man "displaced" to a small village in rural China during the 1960s. Told in the format of a dictionary, with a series of vignettes disguised as entries,A Dictionary of Maqiaois a novel of bold inventionand a fascinating, comic, deeply moving journey through the dark heart of the Cultural Revolution. Entries trace the wisdom and absurdities of Maqiao: the petty squabbles, family grudges, poverty, infidelities, fantasies, lunatics, bullies, superstitions, and especially the odd logic in their use of languagewhere the word for "beginning" is the same as the word for "end"; "little big brother" means older sister; to be "scientific" means to be lazy; and "streetsickness" is a disease afflicting villagers visiting urban areas. Filled with colorful charactersfrom a weeping ox to a man so poisonous that snakes die when they bite himA Dictionary of Maqiaois both an important work of Chinese literature and a probing inquiry into the extraordinary power of language.

Han Shaogong is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and translator. He is also the former editor of the magazines Hainan Review and Frontiers and is the vice-chairman of the Hainan Writer's Association.

Julia Lovell is a translator of modern Chinese literature and a research fellow at Queen's College, Cambridge.