Sign-In
Cart
Land of Big Numbers: Stories
Paperback
Publisher Price: $18.99
ISBN13: 9780358272557
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: Feb 2 2021
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.20 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
A Best Book of the Year: Barack Obama - NPR - The Washington Post - The Philadelphia Inquirer - Esquire - Kirkus Reviews - Chicago Public Library - Electric Literature
Malala Yousafzai's Fearless Book Club Pick for Literati
Dazzling...Riveting. --New York Times Book Review
Gripping and illuminating . . . At the heart of Te-Ping Chen's remarkable debut lies a question all too relevant in 21st Century America: What is freedom? --Jennifer Egan
Immensely rewarding, from the first sentence to the last . . . An exceptional collection. --Charles Yu
A stirring and brilliant debut story collection, offering vivid portrayals of the men and women of modern China and its diaspora, both love letter and sharp social criticism, from a phenomenal new literary talent bringing great insight from her years as a reporter with the Wall Street Journal (Elle).
Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers traces the journeys of the diverse and legion Chinese people, their history, their government, and how all of that has tumbled--messily, violently, but still beautifully--into the present.
Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chen's stories coalesce into a portrait of a people striving for openings where mobility is limited. Twins take radically different paths: one becomes a professional gamer, the other a political activist. A woman moves to the city to work at a government call center and is followed by her violent ex-boyfriend. A man is swept into the high-risk, high-reward temptations of China's volatile stock exchange. And a group of people sit, trapped for no reason, on a subway platform for months, waiting for official permission to leave.
With acute social insight, Te-Ping Chen layers years of experience reporting on the ground in China with incantatory prose in this taut, surprising debut, proving herself both a remarkable cultural critic and an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice.
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Agee, Joel
Musil, Robert
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Baughman, Judith
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paperback