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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ISBN: 1842431625
EAN:
Price: £6.99
Casing: Paperback
Format: B (198 x 129mm)
Extent: 320pp
Rights: UK & Commonwealth excl. Canada
Pub. Date: September 2005

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wang Shuo became a best-selling author in China, with over 20 novels and 10 million copies in print, appealing across the spectrum from the business community to factory workers and students and resulting in his collected works being banned in China in 1996. He now lives in Los Angeles. Playing for Thrills was his first novel to be made available in the West and was followed by Please Don't Call Me Human, also published by No Exit Press.
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ABOUT THE BOOK

Stephen King called Playing for Thrills, Wang Shuo's stupendous debut novel, 'perhaps the most brilliantly entertaining hardboiled novel of the 90's...Raymond Chandler crossed with Bruce Lee.'

Now Wang Shuo, easily China's coolest and most popular novelist, applies his genius for satire and cultural irreverence to one of the world's sacred rituals, the Olympic games. In Please Don't Call me Human, he imagines an Olympics where nations compete not on the basis of athletic prowess, but on their citizens' capacity for humiliation - and China is determined to win at any cost. The novel's anti-hero is a slacker pedicab driver from Beijing, a degenerate nihilist who rips off his own face in order to win the gold for China. Banned in China for its 'rudeness' and 'vulgarity', this astonishing, tripped-out novel is filled with the kind of word play and outlandish antics that have earned Wang Shuo his own genre, 'hooligan literature'.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

"...China's Kerouac..." - Judith Freeman, New York Times

"...Wang Shuo is the real thing, and the stuff that comes out of his head is the stuff of true satire..." - Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian