First published in Chinese in 2011 and recently translated by Rojas, this study of literary representation considers how various forms of realism—and critical departures from them—convey a sense of truth. Yan illustrates his arguments with examples from a stunning range of authors, including Chinese luminaries such as Lu Xun and Shen Congwen as well as a host of notables from around the world, with special emphasis given to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Flaubert, Kafka, and García Márquez. As Yan explains, there are “four different levels of truth” expressed in realist literature. The two most profound are “vital truth,” which involves the expression of a psychological reality beyond mere appearances; and “spiritual truth,” which strikes even deeper, expressing something essential about the soul of a character or culture. Kafka’s Metamorphosis is one of the recurring literary touchstones here, and Yan insightfully interprets the work as a seminal contribution to modern literature in its turn toward a “hegemonic, imperial narration” and its rejection of readers’ long-standing expectations about causality. One Hundred Years of Solitude, which also comes up for repeated discussion, is framed as a critical paradigm similar to Yan’s own “mythorealism,” a mode that borrows from both traditional realism and modernist subjectivism to produce “a truth that is obscured by truth itself.” Yan’s commentaries on the realist canon emerging over the last several hundred years are consistently insightful and often strikingly illuminating, as in his assessments of how the strongest writers, from Defoe to Turgenev and beyond, have continually shifted readers’ understanding of what counts as reality. Though some theoretical obscurity does cloud the text and a certain amount of repetitiveness creeps in, the overall arguments and individual readings are accessible and rewarding.