“On October 11, the Chinese writer Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and two months later his new novel, Pow!, demonstrates for Americans why he deserved to win. It’s a vibrant, visceral novel that is both personal and political, realistic and surrealistic, funny and shocking. The explosive title cries out —Pow!— but it is also a subtle display of narrative wizardry. . . . Mo Yan’s Pow! is a pyrotechnic display of how to blow up one’s personal life to mythic proportions.”

Steven Moore | Washington Post

“This vibrant, visceral novel . . . takes aim at gross materialism and corruption.”

New York Times Book Review

“Mo Yan is a writer who, defiantly in the face of those who wish his work were less cartoonish and more straightforward in its political meanings, continues to sing his own peculiar and alluring song.”

Dwight Garner | New York Times

“Mo the public figure is careful with words. But Mo the novelist slips past the censors by dressing up his cutting realism in absurd and fantastic clothing. In doing so, he’s embracing a long tradition that stretches from Cervantes to the German novelist Günter Grass. . . . Mo’s skill makes POW! a wild, unpredictable ride—a work of demented and subversive genius.”

Hector Tobar | Los Angeles Times

“Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose work Mo Yan has claimed as an inspiration, sometimes the images in Pow! overflow, and the very point of his writing is that abundance. Unlike the magical realists, however, there is a lucid clarity to Mo Yan’s best writing. In this country he is akin to William T. Vollmann, whose books are long and dense with harrowing and acute images.”

John Freeman | Boston Globe

“The brilliance of this novel—and the reason it deserves comparisons to so many great authors—is the way in which this tragic story is filtered through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy. . . . As a result, the story gets pulled and twisted out of shape, and what is ‘real’ becomes a lot less certain—especially when Xiaotong keeps insisting on his story’s veracity.”

Chad Post | Three Percent

“Pow! is a frenzied stew of stinging satire and theatre of the absurd. Readers are free to interpret it as they wish; the truth is in there somewhere.”

Jason Beerman | Toronto Star

“There is little doubt that Mo Yan’s novel Pow!—with its Rabelaisian carnivalesque language and surrealist narration—rightly belongs among the best of world literature. . . . Mo’s novel in the English version, rendered beautifully and ingeniously by Howard Goldblatt, has acquired a poetic, or rather, onomatopoetic title . . . [and] readers of Pow! are bombarded page after page by the blaring force of a story of carnivorous excess that bares China’s soiled bottom.”

Yunte Huang | Chicago Tribune

“Mo Yan spares the reader nothing. He recounts matters disgusting, ugly, raunchy, repulsive, sexually graphic, ineffably sad, occasionally joy-filled—all of which combine to make a novel larger than life.”

Valerie Ryan | Seattle Times

"Pow! is a Rorschach inkblot of a book, and all the better for not telling the reader what to think. Within the book, meat is everywhere and everything. What that means could be anything."

Economist

“Recently enshrined Nobel laureate Mo Yan’s latest novel is a rip-roarin’, gut-bustin’, greasy meal of a book. . . . Pow! is a hilariously slapstick affair, salted with subtle critique of a corrupt government and well-seasoned with sly satire. It’s a resounding confirmation of Mo Yan’s place among the best writers of our time.”

Stephen Sparks | Green Apple Books

“Mo, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, was much criticized in the days following the award for his perceived cozy relationship with the Chinese government and reluctance to stand up for freedom of expression. Such judgments, however, are challenged by his bold, outlandish and far from apolitical new novel. Like his earlier works, Pow! defies easy definition. It is national and personal in its concerns, surreal and real, and as comic as it is serious.”

Krys Lee | Financial Times

“Mo’s work is shot through with politics and history, and Pow! is no exception. Translated by the masterful Howard Goldblatt, Pow! adds to the growing list of Mo Yan’s rollicking and ribald novels available in English—all translated by Goldblatt, who has championed Mo Yan’s work for decades and continues to do the author great justice in his earthy and vivid translations.”

Andrea Lingenfelter | Quarterly Conversation

“Its flights of hallucinatory fancy anchored by its fixation with flesh, Pow! has an almost medieval bawdiness and carnality. . . . Yan’s concern with eternal human frailties and the greed found in small communities feels timeless. At least, courtesy of a mouth-watering translation by Howard Goldblatt, he gives us plenty to chew on.”

Herald Scotland