Land Of Big Numbers : Stories

A Best Book of the Year: Barack Obama * NPR * The Washington Post * The Philadelphia Inquirer * Esquire * Kirkus Reviews * Chicago Public Library * Electric Literature

Malala Yousafzais Fearless Book Club Pick for Literati

"Dazzling...Riveting."New York Times Book Review

Gripping and illuminating . . . At the heart of Te-Ping Chens 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 tumbledmessily, violently, but still beautifullyinto the present.

Cutting between clear-eyed realism and tongue-in-cheek magical realism, Chens 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 Chinas 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.