Title: Land of Big Numbers: Stories Author: Te-Ping Chen Format: Paperback | 256 pages Named a Best Book of the Year So Far by Esquire, Fortune, and the BBC One of Barack Obama's Summer Reading Picks A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "Dazzling...Riveting." —New York Times Book Review 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. “Haunting . . . [a] strong debut . . . Chen’s sweeping collection comprises many small moments of beauty.” —Publishers Weekly Product Dimension: approx. W2cm x L13cm x H20cm Product Weight: approx. 0.2kg