Pow! (novel)

Pow! (Chinese: 四十一炮; pinyin: sìshíyī pào) is a 2003 novel by the Chinese author and Nobel laureate Mo Yan. The novel's protagonist is Luo Xiaotong, a village boy with a passion for story-telling. It is set in a temple, where Luo recounts the story of his life to an old monk.^[1] He describes the difficult circumstances of his childhood in the "Slaughterhouse Village," a fictional town in which the population is obsessed with the consumption of meat and where corruption is rife.^[2]

POW!

First edition (Chinese)
Author	Mo Yan
Original title	四十一炮
Translator	Howard Goldblatt
Language	Chinese
Genre	Novel
Publisher	(Eng. trans.) Seagull Books
Publication date	2003
Publication place	China
Published in English	15 December 2012
Media type	Print (Hardback
Pages	386 pp (Eng. trans. edition)
ISBN	0857420763 (Eng. trans. edition)
Preceded by	Frog

The novel has been interpreted as an allegorical commentary on the state of contemporary Chinese society, though Mo himself maintains that he is merely a storyteller, uninterested in ideology.^[3]