Soul Mountain

In 1983, Chinese playwright, critic, fiction writer, and painter Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with lung cancer and faced imminent death. But six weeks later, a second examination revealed there was no cancer -- he had won "a reprieve from death." Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing and began a journey of 15,000 kilometers into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southwest China. The result of this epic voyage of discovery is *Soul Mountain*.

Bold, lyrical, and prodigious, *Soul Mountain* probes the human soul with an uncommon directness and candor and delights in the freedom of the imagination to expand the notion of the individual self.