Stick Out Your Tongue

"Extraordinary. . .  [Ma Jian] has shown us how poverty and political repression have deformed [Tibet's] once rich and vibrant culture." —Francine Prose, People

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, a blanket ban was placed on Ma Jian's future work. With its publication in English, including a new afterword by the author, readers get a rare glimpse of Tibet through Chinese eyes and a window on the imagination of one of China's foremost writers.


"These powerful pages . . . are hard to shake from one's memory and remain . . . testimony to the storytelling artistry of Ma Jian." —The Washington Post

"The people Ma Jian transfigures, the images of a Tibet where the living and the dead seem to mingle with beauty and unease, all this becomes quite a striking souvenir of our own high altitude pilgrimage through these exotic pages." —NPR's All Things Considered