Don’t Speak

BEIJING — A writer who names himself Don’t Speak, an allusion to the fear of getting into trouble in a one-party state, becomes a top literary official of that state and goes on to win the world’s biggest literary award.

Fiction? A Kafkaesque literary thrust at the bitter, age-old struggle between power and freedom? A story idea of which any author would be proud?

No, because that’s what happened on Thursday, when Mo Yan, the vice chairman of the state-run Chinese Writers’ Association, won the Nobel Prize in Literature. More at IHT Rendezvous.

A fascinating read.