"The best novel of the year isn’t that DeLillo-on-automatic-pilot thing that broke out, along with SARS, this spring; nor the smutty anti-Islamic screed by the superannuated French juvenile delinquent; nor even Jane Smiley’s excellent investigation of the unlikely souls of real estate agents. Rather, it is this ’dictionary’ of the dialect of a fictitious village, Maqiao, host in the squat hills of South China."

--San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"A Dictionary of Maqiao is a wonderful, many-layered novel.., clever, sympathetic and amused Julia Lovell’s translation is an impressive achievement, a fine reflection of a complex book."

--Times Literary Supplement

From the daring imagination of one of China’s greatest living novelists comes a work of startling power and originality--the 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 Maqiao is a novel of bold invention-and 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 characters--from a weeping ox to a man so poisonous that snakes die when they bite him--A Dictionary of Maqiao is both an important work of Chinese literature and a probing inquiry into the extraordinary power of language.

Translator’s Preface 

A Note About the Translation

Editorial Note 

List of Entries 

A Dictionary ofMaoiao

Afterword 

Guide to Principal characters 

Guide to Pronunciation of Transliterated chinese

Glossary