"An intellectual adventure story. . . . Five hundred bloody and instructive pages later, you just want to stand up and howl."
-Alan Cheuse,
San Francisco Chronicle "[Jiang Rong] is on the way to becoming one of the most celebrated and controversial Chinese novelists in the world."
-
The Guardian (London)
"Electrifying. . . . The power of Jiang's prose (and of Howard Goldblatt's excellent translation) is evident. . . . This semi-autographical novel is a literary triumph."
-
National Geographic Traveler (Book of the Month)
Jiang Rong was born in Jiangsu, China, in 1946. In 1967, he volunteered to work in China's Inner Mongolia region, where he lived and labored with the native nomads for the next eleven years. A growing fascination for the mythologies surrounding the wolves of the grasslands inspired him to learn all he could about them, and he adopted and raised an orphaned wolf cub. In 1978 he returned to Beijing and continued his education at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Jiang worked as an academic until his retirement in 2006.
Howard Goldblatt (translator)
is the foremost translator of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in the West. He has published English translations of more than thirty novels and story collections by writers from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. He has also authored and edited half a dozen books on Chinese literature. He is currently a professor at the University of Notre Dame.