Please Don't Call Me Human - Wang Shuo

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’.