This is the extraordinary prison memoir of one of China's most prominent dissidents and author of The Corpse Walker. In China, the government continues to erase and distort the collective memory of the country to suit its all-encompassing political agenda. However, an individual's memory, with its psychic encoding and indelible scars of oppression, will forever hide a deeply etched record in blood and intellect. Its imprint, like history, can never be erased. In June 1989, Liao Yiwu witnessed the Tiananmen Square protest. The young poet, who had until then led an apolitical bohemian existence, found his voice in that moment and proclaimed his outrage in the poem 'Massacre'. For a Song and a Hundred Songs captures the four brutal years Liao spent in jail for writing his incendiary poem.