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Land of Big Numbers : Stories – Te-Ping Chen
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LAND OF BIG NUMBERS : Stories

Te-Ping Chen
BRAND NEW, PAPERBACK

RM11.00

A Provocative & Dazzling Debut Short Stories Collection From An Extraordinary New Talent That Vividly Gives Voice To Men & Women of Modern China And Its Diaspora

ISBN 9780358272557
Book Condition BRAND NEW
Format PAPERBACK
Publisher Mariner Books
Publication Date 02 Feb 2021
Pages 256
Weight 0.32 kg
Dimension 20 × 13 × 2.5 cm
Retail Price RM69.90
Availability: 2 in stock

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2 in stock

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★★ One of Barack Obama’s Summer Reading Picks ★★
 
★★ A Best Book of the Year: ★★
◆ NPR
◆ The Washington Post
◆ The Philadelphia Inquirer
◆ Esquire
◆ Kirkus Reviews
◆ Chicago Public Library
◆ Electric Literature
 
★★ Malala Yousafzai’s Fearless Book Club Pick for Literati ★★
 
★★ Named a Most Anticipated Title of 2021 by: ★★
Elle, Esquire, O Magazine, Buzzfeed, Newsweek, Refinery29, Lit Hub, The Millions, Bustle, Redbook, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, Write or Die Tribe, Autostraddle, and The Buzz Magazines
 
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. It offers a great insight into modern-day China, picking up on the minor idiosyncrasies that keep society ticking.


Land of Big Numbers, a new volume of short stories by Wall Street Journal reporter Te-Ping Chen, turns the raw material of such vignettes into provocative fiction. Her stories resemble miniature landscapes, illuminated by fine detail and idiosyncrasy.
 
A young woman from the countryside finds work in a Shanghai flower shop and daydreams about the lives of her well-off customers, a farmer seeks to build an airplane from metal scraps, and a chef tries and fails to understand his twin sister’s political activism. Where a news story limits itself to questions that can be answered, Chen’s fiction embraces uncertainty and contradiction that at times make it feel truer than a dispatch.
 
A brother competes for gaming glory while his twin sister exposes the dark side of the Communist government on her underground blog; a worker at a government call centre is alarmed one day to find herself speaking to a former lover; a delicious new fruit arrives at the neighbourhood market and the locals find it starts to affect their lives in ways they could never have imagined; and a young woman’s dreams of making it big in Shanghai are stalled when she finds herself working as a florist.
 
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.
 
These are just some of the myriad lives to be evoked in The Land of Big Numbers, a collection of stories which – sometimes playfully, sometimes darkly – draws back the curtain on the realities of modern China and unveils a cast of characters as rich and complicated as any in world literature. With virtuosic brilliance, Te-ping Chen sheds light on a country much talked about but little understood and announces the birth of a bright new star in the literary firmament.
 
Most of the stories have a dreamlike quality to them, much like a short by Haruki Murakami. They start off normal enough, regarding love or aspiration, and then transpire through a tunnel of hallucinatory reality — a total blurring of the lines. They also focus on the China that westerners have come to hear more and more about in recent years; Controlling regimes, unprecedented growth and turbulent societal structures.
 
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.
 
It is highly recommend this to anyone who wants to learn more about Chinese culture. Given it’s a collection of short stories, they’re easily digestible thanks to Chen’s remarkable insight. Matched with her journalistic eye for detail, each offers a new perspective on a once shrouded nation.
 
If you’re a fan of Murakami’s short stories, then definitely pick this one up; you won’t be disappointed.
 
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KIRKUS REVIEW :
 
An astonishing collection of stories about life in contemporary China by a Chinese American writer.
 
Chen, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has an eye for the wry, poignant detail in her fiction debut: Elderly men who meet in the park to play chess bring their pet birds along, hanging the birdcages from tree branches while they play. Most of the stories are set in China. In one, a young girl who works in a flower shop becomes dangerously interested in one of her customers.
 
In another, an older man in a remote village tries to build a robot and, later, an airplane. Whether her characters are women or men, young or old, Chen displays a remarkable ability to inhabit their minds. She is gentle and understanding with her characters so that their choices, desires, and regrets open up, petal-like, in story after story.
 
Often, in the background or off to the side, a hint of violence will make itself known: A young man’s twin sister is arrested and beaten by the police; a woman’s abusive ex-boyfriend appears without warning, and she remembers his old penchant for harming animals. A young man borrows money to invest in the stock market, and as his hopes begin to plummet, he learns the details of his father’s traumatic past.
 
Again and again, Chen reveals herself to be a writer of extraordinary subtlety. Details accrue one by one, and as each story reaches its inevitable conclusion, a sense emerges that things could have gone no other way. Still, there’s nothing precious or overly neat here. Chen’s stories speak to both the granular mundanities of her characters’ lives and to the larger cultural, historical, and economic spheres that they inhabit. She is a tremendous talent.
 
Chen’s stories are both subtle and rich, moving and wry, and in their poignancy, they seem boundless.
 
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About the Author :
 
TE-PING CHEN’s fiction has been published in, or is forthcoming from, The New Yorker, Granta, Guernica, Tin House, and The Atlantic. A reporter with the Wall Street Journal, she was previously a correspondent for the paper in Beijing and Hong Kong. Prior to joining the Journal in 2012, she spent a year in China as a Fulbright fellow. She lives in Philadelphia.
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