When penguin paid $100,000 for the worldwide rights to the English translation of Jiang Rong's bestseller Wolf Totem in 2005, it set a record as China's most expensive overseas book deal. The tale of a Beijing student sent to work as a shepherd in Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution went on to bag the first Man Asian Literary Prize in 2007. It has officially sold more than 2 million copies in China—and many more bootlegged ones—making it the country's second biggest seller after Mao Zedong's Little Red Book. Internationally, the novel is China's best performing translated fiction. But even worldwide sales "in the six figures," according to Penguin, are relatively modest compared with international bestsellers like Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, which has sold more than 10 million copies to date.
Sold in translation (Newsweek)
- Dettagli
From the magazine issue dated Jan 11, 2010