Grass Soup Author:Zhang Xianliang, Martha Avery (translator) Zhang Xianliang, one of China's greatest living writers, spent twenty-two years in Chinese prisons and labor camps until his "rehabilitation" in 1979. Through most of those years he kept a diary of his experiences. In Grass Soup he explores the systematic degradation that his brief diary entries both recorded and concealed. The world he shows us... more » is one in which an ill-considered poem title can mean the firing squad, in which learning how to boil a toad or steal plant roots can mean survival. Like Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, this "extraordinary, terrifying" document describes not only how far humanity can fall, but also how "the human spirit can prevail, even in hell" (Ian Buruma, The Independent).« less