Please Don't Call Me Human

Contemporary Chinese writer Wang Shuo, widely celebrated for revealing the "dark corners of new China" (Newsweek), applies his genius for 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 plot unfolds into an alternately bizarre and hilarious satire of nationalism, the Olympics, and the cult of celebrity. Banned in China for its "rudeness" and "vulgarity," this mercilessly brutal satire is filled with the kind of word play and outlandish antics that have earned Wang Shuo his own "genre by itself—call it China noir" (Stephen King).