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Title details for Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen - Available

Land of Big Numbers

Stories

by Te-Ping Chen
Eddy Lee
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available

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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 2, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780358395034
      • File size: 189787 KB
      • Duration: 06:35:23

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      October 12, 2020
      The often haunting stories in Chen’s strong debut follow characters striving for a better futures in China as buried memories begin to surface. The stories with an allegorical bent are some of the best, among them “New Fruit,” in which a “peculiar” agricultural offering, the qiguo, first intoxicates those who eat it, then kindles politically dangerous memories of the Cultural Revolution. Another standout is “Gubeikou Spirit,” in which a train delay traps passengers below ground for months because regulations state that they “must exit at a different station from where they entered.” The absurdism takes on a haunting quality as the passengers adapt to, and then come to prefer, their confinement. The more realist stories offer subtle portrayals of the costs of political activism (“Lulu”), seemingly unbridgeable cultural and marital gulfs (“Field Notes on a Marriage”), and, in the title story, the lure of wealth in China’s booming economy. “Shanghai Murmur,” a melancholy vignette about a florist’s fascination with a rich client, is the most psychologically complex in a collection where the characters can occasionally be one-dimensional. Still, Chen’s sweeping collection comprises many small moments of beauty.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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