Although this book wasn't on your list for this year, I think it is phenomenal. Liao Yiwu is a poet and novelist who lives in China. After he wrote a poem criticizing the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, he was labeled as a dissident and spent four years in jail. This book is a collection of his interviews with people in China, many of whom were afraid to speak to an enemy of the state. If you have a strong stomach, there's a fascinating chapter in which he speaks to the manager of a public toilet. Turns out, the drive to express oneself is so great that the public toilets serve as a kind of community bulletin board, although people criticize each other's graffiti for being counterrevolutionary.
Great book.
~KLM
