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  Land Of Big Numbers - Stories

  Anonymous

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  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 for Literati  
   
   ""Dazzling...Riveting."" —New York Times Book Review 
   
  “Gripping and illuminating . . . 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 
   
   “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 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.

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  Watch With Me - and Six Other...

  Wendell Berry

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  This volume of six linked stories and the novella from which the book derives its title is set in Port William from 1908 to the Second World War. Here Wendell Berry introduces two of his more indelible and poignant characters, Ptolemy Proudfoot and his wife Miss Minnie, remarkable for the comic and affectionate range that—with the mastery of this consummate storyteller working at the height of his powers—here approaches the Shakespearean. 
   
   
   
  Tol Proudfoot is huge, outsized, in the tradition of the mythic. The three-hundred-pound farmer, personally imposing and unkempt, is also the most graceful of presences, reserved and gallant toward his tiny wife, the ninety-pound schoolteacher. 
   
   
   
  Their contrasts are humorous, of course, and recall the tall tales of rural Americana. In the novella Watch with Me, we are given a story of such depth, breadth, and importance it earns being listed as one of the most important short stories written in the American language during the twentieth century.

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  Taken by Three Bodyguards

  Jasmine Black

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  Twenty-one-year-old Stephanie Stephenson has been in a safehouse with her three sexy bodyguards for many months. She’s a lone witness to a murder and they’ve been protecting her from Santonio, the mob boss, who has vowed revenge if she dared to testify. It’s all been strictly professional and platonic with her hunky bodyguards. Now the trial is over and Stephanie is free to go. 
   But her three bodyguards have other plans for Stephanie…very naughty plans.

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  The Alchemist

  H P Lovecraft

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  Title: The Alchemist 
  Author: H. P. Lovecraft 
  Narrator: Jonathan Dunne 
  Original Publication: 1908 
  Public Domain: Yes 
  Series Placement: Number 36 in the Timeless Terrors series 
  Description: 
  The Alchemist by H. P. Lovecraft is a tale of vengeance, decay, and the relentless hand of destiny. In a crumbling French château, generations of an ancient noble family are doomed to die before reaching their thirty-second year — victims, it seems, of a centuries-old curse. As the last heir wanders through the ruins of his lineage, he uncovers the truth behind the curse — and the grim figure who has carried it through time. 
  Written when Lovecraft was just seventeen, The Alchemist reveals the early foundations of his fascination with ancestral guilt and cosmic inevitability. The story’s gothic atmosphere, shadowed corridors, and sense of doomed inheritance foreshadow the cosmic horror that would later define his work. 
  Narrated by Amazon bestselling horror author Jonathan Dunne, this performance captures Lovecraft’s blend of decay and dread — the echo of old oaths, the dust of forgotten laboratories, and the whisper of a fate that will not be denied. While the text itself is in the public domain, this narration is an original performance and copyright © 2025 Jonathan Dunne. 
  Part of Timeless Terrors, a series devoted to resurrecting the masters of the macabre, The Alchemist endures as a reminder that even youth’s first nightmares can echo through eternity — and that some legacies are written not in ink, but in blood and time.

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  Breathing In Rio

  Alfred C. Martino

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  Rio, a place of beauty, excitement, and wonder. A place where you are free to dance until your feet ache and sing until you can no more. In this short story, a woman and her mother experience this and more during their visit to Brazil's most famous city.
   
  
   
  Alfred C. Martino is the author of three highly acclaimed novels, Perfected by Girls, Pinned, and Over the End Line, and the stage play Waiting for a Friend. Mr. Martino was born and raised in Short Hills, NJ, and graduated from Millburn High School. He is a graduate of Duke University and The Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. He currently lives in Jersey City.

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  Three Odd Tales

  George Thomas S.

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  Welcome to Creelyville:..when a loser on the run from the police finds his was to Creelyville he thinks he may have hit on some good luck and opportunity, but did he? 
    
  The Failure:...His pitiful life of failure has left him with nothing. Is there a way to redeem himself? Perhaps even become famous?   
    
  The Counselor:..Everyone can use some good advice, from time to time. The people of Cross Corner, an old west town in the 1800's, in the middle of nowhere and on deaths door, are no exception. But is the advice always worthwhile?  

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