Red Sorghum

Blurb

Red Sorghum: A Novel of China or Red Sorghum Clan is a Chinese language novel by Mo Yan. Published in 1986, it was Mo's first novel and remains one of his best-known works.
The novel consists of the volumes "Red Sorghum", "Sorghum Wine", "Dog Ways", "Sorghum Funeral", and "Strange Death", which were first serialized in various magazines in 1986. "Dog Ways" was published in the April 1986 issue of Shiyue; "Sorghum Wine" in the July 1986 issue of PLA Arts, "Sorghum Funeral" in the August 1986 issue of Beijing Wenxue and "Strange Death" in the November-December issue of Kunlun magazine. It was the magazine serializations before the publication of the full novel in 1987 which were seen by director Zhang Yimou, who immediately proposed to Mo Yan to make the novel into a film. The next year the novel was published, and almost simultaneously the 1987 Chinese-language film Red Sorghum won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. It was initially given an ad hoc English title "The Red Sorghum Clan" in some sources but was translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt in 1993 with the subtitle "Red Sorghum - A Novel of China".