This book offers a fresh and nuanced perspective into contemporary Chinese literature by presenting four authors and cultural bastards--Duo Duo, an underground seer-poet; Wang Shuo, a ''hooligan'' writer; Zhang Chengzhi, an old Red Guard and new cultural heretic; and Wang Xiaobo, a defiant yet melancholy chronicler of a dystopian modern world. It analyzes each of these authors' distinctive (re)visions of a double-faced Chinese modernity against a collective legacy of the Cultural Revolution, and argues for the restoration of a historical horizon of China's transition from the Cultural Revolution to a hybrid moment of the present and future ridden with uncertainties.