Dream of Ding Village by Yan Lianke paints a bleak picture of the world created through the coupling of communist wastefulness with capitalist greed. Narrated by a ghost of a teenage boy murdered in an act of vengeance against his family, the novel offers a darkly satirical portrayal of the 1990s AIDS epidemic that engulfed several rural Chinese provinces in the aftermath of the government’s Plasma Economy campaign. (KA)