Playing for Thrills: A Mystery
Wang Shuo, Howard Goldblatt (translation)Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 (http://archive.org/details/playingforthrillOOwang)
A writer in Beijing, who is a prime suspect in a murder, interrogates his friends regarding the night in question. Did he actually kill someone? The writer, Fang Yan, was so drunk he cannot remember.
Wang Shuo emerged as a literary force in China in the late 1980s, pioneering a movement known as pizi wenxue, or hooligan literature. Instead of ascribing to the Communist Party's goal of "spiritual civilization", he shunned the heroic models common in Chinese literature. Playing for Thrills is the first book published in English from the man whom Newsweek calls "China's literary bad boy" & The Washington Post acclaims as "the irreverent voice of a disillusioned generation." With shades of Chandler & Kerouac, Playing for Thrills is a dark, disembodied, yet compelling story of an anti-hero's search for the truth about a mysterious murder. As the narrator drifts through the seamy underside of Beijing & its environs, he meets a handful of incredibly varied characters as jaded & enigmatic as himself.