A rare glimpse into the unfiltered consciousness of China's "lost generation" Wu Zili has decided to kill himself. But first, he must write. In this raw and unflinching novel, Ouyang Yu takes us inside the mind of a young university student in 1980s China who has lost faith in everything—love, friendship, society, and life itself. Wu Zili's plan is simple: fill 200,000 words with his thoughts, memories, plagiarized confessions, and found writings, then disappear without a trace. What emerges is unlike anything in contemporary Chinese literature: a collage-novel that breaks every rule, mixing diary entries, copied poems, philosophical rants, sexual confessions, and desperate howls into a portrait of alienation so complete it becomes almost unbearable. Wu Zili sees through the hypocrisy of everything around him—the pretensions of his classmates, the emptiness of political study sessions, the meaningless rituals of daily life in a cramped dormitory. Yet within the darkne...