The Dog

Touching and humane * Financial Times * Livings has a keen eye for details and a knack for dialogue * The Spectator * A captivating read * The Lady * A socially complex and pitch-perfect account of modernization's grueling aftermath * Publishers Weekly * Already causing excitement in America, Jack Livings's remarkable The Dog is an impressive clutch of stories showing post-Mao China * Sunday Times * A brilliant and promising debut. With its tales of volatile protagonists struggling to survive in contemporary China, The Dog should attract widespread attention and praise . . . Any unfamiliarity with the Chinese locales and culture is quickly eased by Livings's imaginative yet realistic scenarios and vividly drawn characters * Booklist * What gives these stories their dark, upsetting grandeur is in every case the luminosity of hope, no matter how fragile, how vulnerable, how very nearly extinguished -- Paul Harding, 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning author of 'Tinkers' Livings writes so simply, and so well . . . These stories are sneaky, almost subliminal, in their ambitions and connections * Kirkus Reviews * Livings's magnificent debut collection of short stories, The Dog, all set in contemporary, or near-contemporary China, satisfies that basic readerly urge, pitched somewhere between escapism and anthropological curiosity, to be transported. * The Independent * A book of extraordinary power * The Guardian * Stunning. The Dog bristles with prickly details and barbed observations . . . An incisive - and highly impressive - debut * New York Times *