The Dog Stories

by Livings, Jack

• ISBN13: 9780374178536
• ISBN10: 0374178534
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-08-05
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

"Jack Livings's stories of China are marvels of the imagination." —Paul Harding, author of Tinkers

Set in the shifting landscape of contemporary China, Jack Livings's The Dog explodes the country's cultural and social fault lines, revealing a nation accustomed to rations, bitter struggle, and the stranglehold of communism as it confronts a generation rife with the promise of unforeseen prosperity.
In this riveting, richly imagined collection, a wealthy factory owner—once a rural peasant—refuses to help the victims of an earthquake until his daughter starts a relief effort of her own; a marginalized but powerful Uyghur gangster clashes with his homosexual grandson; and a dogged journalist is forced to resign as young writers in "pink Izod golf shirts and knockoff Italian loafers" write his stories out from under him. With spare, penetrating prose, Livings gives shape to the anonymous faces in the crowd and illuminates the tensions, ironies, and possibilities of life in modern China. As heartbreaking as it is hopeful, The Dog marks the debut of a startling and wildly imaginative new voice in fiction.

Author Biography

Jack Livings received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He has published stories in The Paris Review, A Public Space, StoryQuarterly, Tin House, and The Best American Short Stories, and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and short-listed for an O. Henry Award. Livings interviewed Tobias Wolff and Salman Rushdie for The Paris Review’s Art of Fiction series; the Rushdie interview has been reprinted in The Paris Review Interviews III. He works at a well-known news magazine and lives in New York with his wife, the writer Jennie Yabroff.