Land of Big Numbers
Author(s): Te-Ping Chen
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 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.
Product Information
General Fields
- :
- : Scribner
- : Scribner
- : 01 December 2020
- : {"length"=>["8.504"], "width"=>["5.315"], "units"=>["Inches"]}
- : books
Special Fields
- : Te-Ping Chen
- : Paperback
- : English
- : 813/.6
- : very good
- : 256