About the Author

Wang Xiaobo was born in 1952. From 1968 to 1970, he worked on a farm in Yunnan, China, as an 'educated' youth. He published Golden Age in 1992, first in Taiwan, but publication in China soon followed, where it was an immediate success, still topping bestseller lists today. Wang Xiaobo died of a heart attack in 1997, at the age of forty-four.

Reviews

Pleasure of Thinking is a very captivating book. Wang Xiaobo's unique blend of rationality, serenity, candor, and sense of humour serves as an embodiment of the liberalism he ardently believes in. Such expression stands as the archenemy of autocracy, for in autocratic societies, all the regime's endeavors aim to eradicate any fertile ground where liberalism might flourish
*Ai Weiwei*

An ironist, in the vein of Kurt Vonnegut, with a piercing eye for the intrusion of politics into private life… Long after his death, of a heart attack, at the age of forty-four, Wang’s views still circulate among fans like a secret handshake
*New Yorker*

Consistently insightful and often charming . . . A wide-ranging, humorous, often sharp collection
*Kirkus Reviews*

Admired for his cynicism, irony, humor, readers and critics around the world now widely regard Wang Xiaobo as one of the most important modern Chinese authors . . . His [writing is] considered crucial to understanding China's recent past . . . Wang now rivals the World War II-era Hong Kong writer Zhang Ailing as the most popular modern Chinese author
*New York Review of Books*

Wang Xiaobo was arguably the most influential intellectual of the post-Tiananmen generation, a nonchalant provocateur as well as an unconventional, anti-authoritarian thinker whose writing has stood the test of time
*author of MINJIAN*