Land of Big Numbers: Stories

by Chen, Te-Ping
5 out of 5 Customer Rating
ISBN: 9780358272557
Availability:
$7.99
Used - Trade Paperback - 9780358272557

Available Offers

Overview

A debut collection from an extraordinary new talent, vividly giving voice to the men and women of modern China and its diaspora.

Gripping and compassionate, Land of Big Numbers depicts 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 with 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 as well as an astonishingly accomplished new literary voice.
  • Format: TradePaperback
  • Author: Chen, Te-Ping
  • ISBN: 9780358272557
  • Condition: Used
  • Dimensions: 7.90 x 0.90
  • Number Of Pages: 256
  • Publication Year: 2021

Customer Reviews