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For A Song And One Hundred Songs
Liao Yiwu
A Poet's Journey through a Chinese Prison
New Harvest
June 2013
On Sale: June 4, 2013
432 pages ISBN: 0547892632 EAN: 9780547892634 Kindle: B00B77UDX4 Hardcover / e-Book
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Fiction Poetry
WINNER OF THE 2012 GERMAN BOOK TRADE PEACE PRIZE
In June 1989, news of the Tiananmen Square protests
and its bloody resolution reverberated throughout the world.
A young poet named Liao Yiwu, who had until then led an
apolitical bohemian existence, found his voice in that
moment. Like the solitary man who stood firmly in front of a
line of tanks, Liao proclaimed his outrage—and his words
would be his weapon. For a Song and a
Hundred Songs captures the four brutal years Liao spent
in jail for writing the incendiary poem “Massacre.” Through
the power and beauty of his prose, he reveals the bleak
reality of crowded Chinese prisons—the harassment from
guards and fellow prisoners, the torture, the conflicts
among human beings in close confinement, and the boredom of
everyday life. But even in his darkest hours, Liao manages
to unearth the fundamental humanity in his cell mates: he
writes of how they listen with rapt attention to each
other’s stories of criminal endeavors gone wrong and of how
one night, ravenous with hunger, they dream up an “imaginary
feast,” with each inmate trying to one-up the next by
describing a more elaborate dish. In this
important book, Liao presents a stark and devastating
portrait of a nation in flux, exposing a side of China that
outsiders rarely get to see. In the wake of 2011’s Arab
Spring, the world has witnessed for a second time China’s
crackdown on those citizens who would speak their mind, like
artist Ai Weiwei and legal activist Chen Guangcheng. Liao
stands squarely among them and gives voice to not only his
own story, but to the stories of those individuals who can
no longer speak for themselves. For a Song and a Hundred
Songs bears witness to history and will forever change
the way you view the rising superpower of China.
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