"A Date with a Master" Author: Mo Yan Subtitle: Mo Yan's Complete Works·Short Stories Series No. 3

This book, "Dating with Masters", contains 25 short stories written by Mo Yan from the late 1990s to the new century, including "The Beauty on a Donkey on Chang'an Avenue", "The Beauty on Ice and Snow", "Moonlight Slash", "The Lover of the Leper Woman", "Nine Novel Sections", etc. He integrates bizarre imagination into traditional narrative art, and pays more attention to human nature and human survival than the hometown where the characters are rooted; he describes beauty and evil with legendary stories full of mysterious atmosphere, and makes everything obscured by history return to people's vision with ghostly shadows.

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"Mo Yan's novels often give people a bright and hopeful feeling. I think that the primary task of our literature is to have trust in human beings, and the mission of literature is to express the conviction that human society is moving from darkness to some light."

——Oe Kenzaburo

"His novels have an urgency and weight that cannot be described in a few words. All representative novels tell the conflicts that human emotions fall into when secular rules oppress them. Mo Yan describes how people eat, how they endure hunger, how they suffer thirst, how they talk, how they are loved, and how they kill in a dizzying way. A good novelist loves all his characters and devotes himself to his characters, including those who will or must commit crimes in the novel. Anyone who wants to talk about China should read Mo Yan's books first. I think he can be on par with Faulkner."

—Martin Walser, German writer

"Born in 1955 into a peasant family in northern China, Mo Yan has built a breathtaking platform using brutal events, magical realism, fetishization of women, descriptions of nature, and profound metaphors."

—John Updike

"The Swedish Academy used the comment 'inducing hallucinations' in its award citation for Mo Yan. Mo Yan's literary world is like a secret garden, creating surreal illusions in reality, but those illusions are exactly where people are, ready to emerge."

——American scholar Song Mingwei

In novels such as A Wolf Hanging Upside Down on an Apricot Tree and Night Fishing, Mo Yan is a young narrator who uses his own experience and life logic to understand the world he lives in. Therefore, the language of the novels is childish and innocent. However, beneath this childishness and innocence, Mo Yan also has his views on major social issues such as life and politics.

——Zhou Chunling

Mo Yan's "Moonlight Slash" is similar to Lu Xun's "The Forged Sword", which uses comedy to summon the tragic spirit and expresses a certain social sentiment today in a roundabout way.

——Bi Guangming