Land of big numbers / Te-Ping Chen.
"A debut story collection offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of life for contemporary Chinese people, set between China and the United States"-- Provided by publisher.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780358331544
- ISBN: 0358331544
- ISBN: 9780358272557
- ISBN: 0358272556
- Physical Description: 236 pages ; 21 cm
- Publisher: Boston : Mariner Books, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.
- Copyright: ©2021
Content descriptions
Formatted Contents Note: | Lulu -- Hotline girl -- New fruit -- Field notes on a marriage -- Flying machine -- On the street where you live -- Shanghai murmur -- Land of big numbers -- Beautiful country -- Gubeikou spirit. |
Search for related items by subject
Genre: | Short stories. Short stories. |
Show Only Available Copies
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Homer Public Library | F CHEN (Text) | 000159948 | Fiction | Available | - |
Land of Big Numbers
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Summary
Land of Big Numbers
One of Barack Obama's Summer Reading Picks "Dazzling...Riveting." -- New York Times Book Review "Chen has one of the year's big debut books." -- Philadelphia Inquirer "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.