“People’s spirits resemble a patch of grass struggling to grow in the intermittently light and dark area beneath partially open and partially closed windows.”
From his humble beginnings as a propaganda writer, Yan Lianke has gone on to become among China’s most controversial writers one whose work is frequently censored for its focus on the lives of those devastated by Beijing’s policies. “When people are dreamwalking,” he writes in The Day the Sun Died (2015), “they see only the people and things they care about, and it is as if