LAND OF BIG NUMBERS - OUT NOW
⊰A Best Book of the Year: Barack Obama · NPR · The Washington Post · The Philadelphia Inquirer · Esquire · Kirkus Reviews · Chicago Public Library · Electric Literature
⊰Malala Yousafzai’s Fearless Book Club Pick ⊰ Longlisted for The Story Prize
“Dazzling…riveting” — New York Times Book Review
“[A] blazingly talented newcomer...These stories combine the unadorned clarity of the very best newspaper writing and the inspired, weird, poetic inventions of fiction. Chen is the real deal.” — The Associated Press
“A powerful and enticing new voice, at times as strange as the dark fairy tale master Carmen Maria Machado, at others as inventive as the absurdist king George Saunders — but always layered with the texture available to a foreign correspondent who has seen it all….A Chen story isn’t all an artful reimagining of a cool newspaper feature but instead something more imagistic and elemental, a reflection on how we all live, no matter where we live.”— Los Angeles Times
“Wall Street Journal correspondent Chen emerges as a fiction powerhouse, each of her 10 stories an immersive literary event...Traversing continents and cultures, moving effortlessly between China and the U.S., Chen deftly presents everyday lives that entertain, educate, and universally resonate.” — Booklist, starred review
"As brilliant an instance of a journalist's keen eye manifesting in luminous fiction as one can find....[a] page-turner of a book…It is a gift to read stories like this. Almost any one of them is worth the price of admission. Thank goodness for journalists like Chen, who even with fiction can teach us so much."—NPR Books
“Gripping and illuminating, Land of Big Numbers offers intimate glimpses of the seductive power of state control: the Faustian bargaining it requires of its citizens, the landscapes and lives it forces them to discard in exchange for material prosperity. At the heart of Te-Ping Chen’s remarkable debut lies a question all too relevant in 21st Century America: What is freedom?”—Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad and Manhattan Beach
“Immensely rewarding, from the first sentence to the last. Te-Ping Chen's writing is clear-eyed, pitch perfect, skillfully restrained and quietly powerful. I will be returning to these stories again, to enjoy them, be consoled by them, and marvel at them. An exceptional collection.”—Charles Yu, author of the National Book Award winner Interior Chinatown
“Te-Ping Chen's Land of Big Numbers is ripe with prose both sharp and beautiful. There is a rare brilliance and a feeling of necessity imbued in every word of these stories. At each story's end you feel wonderfully more awake, more connected and alive. This essential collection reminds us clearly that there is magic and violence all around us….a stunning debut.”—Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, New York Times-bestselling author of Friday Black
“This debut story collection is absolute fire. It has the great quixotic feel of being both ancient and modern all at once…fans of Megha Majumdar, Kamila Shamsie, and Jhumpa Lahiri would love this one.” —Amy Jo Burns, author of Shiner
"[A] blazingly talented newcomer. . . . Chen has said she’s interested in the trade-offs people are willing to make to prosper under repressive regimes, yet she is the least didactic of writers. Her characters are finely etched, often quirky, sometimes wonderful. . . . These stories combine the unadorned clarity of the very best newspaper writing and the inspired, weird, poetic inventions of fiction. Chen is the real deal." —The Associated Press
“A spectacular work, comic, timely, profound. Te-Ping Chen has a superb eye for detail...Her characters are achingly alive. It’s rare to read a collection so satisfying, where every story adds to a gripping and intricate world.”
—Madeleine Thien, author of Booker finalist Do Not Say We Have Nothing
"A stirring and brilliant collection of stories probing the contradictions and beauties of modern China, Te-Ping Chen's debut is both love letter and sharp social criticism. Through scenes firmly planted in reality as well as tales of the bizarre and magical, Chen reveals portraits lovingly rendered with insight."
—Elle
"Remarkable...Unfolds across the modern Chinese diaspora, pinballing between acutely observed realism and tragicomic magical realism...Each haunting, exquisitely crafted story poses powerful questions about freedom, disillusion, and cultural thought, firmly establishing Chen as an emerging visionary to watch."
—Esquire
"An intricately constructed, tenderly observed collection—the sort of stories that skillfully transport you into the daily experience of characters so real, who speak to you with such grace and tangible presence, that you could almost reach out and touch them. Through the lens of these different voices, each vividly alive, Te-Ping Chen shows us how much life, loss, and quiet pleasure exists in the world, just out of view."
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine and Intimations
"The prose is limpid, the observations acute, the situations original, the pacing near perfect…Chen can sketch out a couple of characters and the relationship between them in just a few lines…[Her] vignettes of the cross-cultural relationship ring painfully true with impeccable timing."—Asian Review of Books
"What can a collection of short stories portraying the diversity of China’s people say to America? Much, if those stories are from the pen of Te-Ping Chen…a masterstroke of contemporary literature, both timely and prescient."—The Mountain Times
"Astonishing....Whether her characters are women or men, young or old, Chen displays a remarkable ability to inhabit their minds….a tremendous talent. Chen’s stories are both subtle and rich, moving and wry." — Kirkus Review, starred
A debut collection from an extraordinary new talent, a vivid portrayal of the men and women of modern China and its diaspora.
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.