Mo Yan has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature. This NPR piece on Mo Yan’s writing caught my attention:

Among the works highlighted by the Nobel judges were Red Sorghum, The Garlic Ballads, and Big Breasts & Wide Hips. As NPR’s Lynn Neary reports on Morning Edition, “He’s said to be so prolific that he wrote Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out — which is a 500,000-word epic — in just 43 days. He wrote it with a brush — not a computer — because he says a computer would have slowed him down because he can’t control himself when he’s online; he always has to search up more information.”

I’ve placed Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out on my to-read list.