Sarah Crichton Books – förlag

Mao Zedong's labour reform camps were notoriously brutal: modeled after the Soviet gulag, their inmates were subject to backbreaking labour, malnutrition, and vindictive wardens. They were thought to be impossible to escape but one man did. Xu Hongci, a young medical student, was a loyal member of the Communist Party until he fell victim to Mao's Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957. After posting a criticism of the party, he spent the next fourteen years in the labor camps. Despite horrific conditions and terrible odds, Hongci was determined to escape, failing three times before he succeeded in 1972. Hongci broke out of a prison near the Burmese border, traveled across China to see his mother in Shanghai one last time, and then finally crossed the Mongolian border. There he eventually married and settled into a new life, until he was able to return home after Mao's death. Originally published in Hong Kong, Hongci's remarkable memoir recounts his life from childhood through his prison break. After discovering the book in a Hong Kong library, the journalist Erling Hoh tracked down the original manuscript and compiled this abridged translation of Hongci's memoir, which includes background on this turbulent period, an epilogue following Hongci up to his death in 2008, and Hongci's own drawings and maps. Almost nobody was able to escape from Mao's labor camps, but No Wall Too High tells the true story of someone who did.

In Keep It Fake: Inventing an Authentic Life, Eric G. Wilson investigates this phenomenon. He draws on neuroscience, psychology, sociology, philosophy, art, film, literature, and his own life to explore the possibility that there's no such thing as unwavering reality. Whether our left brains are shaping the raw data of our right into fabulous stories or we're so saturated by society's conventions that we're always acting out prefab scripts, we can't help but be phony. But are some fakes more real than others? Are certain lies true? In lively prose - honest, provocative, erudite, witty, wide-ranging (as likely to riff on Bill Murray as to contemplate Plato) - Keep It Fake answers these questions, uncovering bracing truths about what it means to be human and helping us turn our necessary lying into artful living.