num_pages: 93
description: Tibet is a land lost in the glare of politics and romanticism, and Ma Jian set out to discover its truths. Stick Out Your Tongue is a a startlingly vivid portrait of Tibet, both enchanting and horrifying, beautiful and violent, seductive and perverse. In this profound work of fiction, a Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is walking to a sacred mountain to seek forgiveness for sleeping with his daughter, meets a silversmith who has hung the wind-dried corpse of his lover on the wall of his cave, and hears the story of a young female incarnate lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite. In the thin air of the high plateau, the divide between dream and reality becomes confused. When this book was published in Chinese in 1997, the government accused Ma Jian of “harming the fraternal solidarity of the national minorities,” and a blanket ban was placed on his future work. With its publication in English, including a new afterword by the author that sets the book in its personal and political context, readers get a rare glimpse of Tibet through Chinese eyes—and a window on the imagination of one of China’s foremost writers.
language: English
title: Stick Out Your Tongue
titlecomplete: Stick Out Your Tongue
genres: Asian Literature, Asia, Chinese Literature, Anthologies, Historical Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction, Travel, Contemporary, China
ratings_count: 1045
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
category: Longlist, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Kiriyama Prize
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 1420099200000
name: Награда "Елена Мутева" на СБП за художествен превод от млад преводач
publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux