Gao Xingjian is the first Chinese Nobel Laureate in Literature. The Swedish Academy summarized his achievements as follows: "An oeuvre of universal validity, bitter insights and linguistic ingenuity, which has opened new paths for the Chines novel and drama." The collection, which aims to present the diversity of Gao's literary talents, contains the highlights of his essays, stories, plays and poems.

Gao Xingjian, 2000 winner of the Noble Prize for Literature, approaches his writing with a strong conviction of the purity of literature and of its dignity as art. The result is what he calls “Cold Literature”: it is personal, detached, apolitical and antipathetic to noise, yet it is also compelling and capable of engaging the reader with an enthralling cogency.

The present anthology contains many gems of Gao's works, which present an all-round picture of Gao and his many talents, as novelist, playwright, poet, painter and theorist. They lead the reader into a world that is uniquely his, the quest for the self and its salvation, the depth of his understanding of the tragedy of modern man and finally, the dignity of being human.

Cold Literature also brings together for the first time two English translators of Gao Xingjian's works, Gilbert C. F. Fong and Mabel Lee. Some of the translations in this collection are newly produced, and others have been revised, so that the beauty and musicality of Gao's language are revealed in Chinese as well as in English.