Land Of Big Numbers

Author: Te-Ping Chen

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $35.00 NZD
  • : 9781398503366
  • : Scribner
  • : Scribner
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  • : December 2020
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  • : 35.0
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Te-Ping Chen
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  • : Paperback
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  • : English
  • : 813/.6
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  • : 256
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Barcode 9781398503366
9781398503366

Description

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.