The Dog

June 2, 2014
Livings’s debut collection of stories set in China builds on the works of fellow writers Yiyun Li and Ma Jian in illustrating the ways in which personal dynamics and workplace disharmony are refractions of a culture of corruption and control as well as China’s wider revolutionary history. In the title story, an unhappy couple whose dog-racing side-business is subjected to a government crackdown resolves to eat the evidence. “Mountain of Swords, Sea of Fire,” in which a weathered journalist despairs of the hack work and political cant he produces while living in denial of his own complicity in silencing democratic agitators, develops Livings’s themes more subtly, as does “The Pocketbook,” in which the universities’ placating attitude toward scholars and foreign guests is laid bare after a rich American student has her purse stolen. Livings has a talent for showing how officially sanctioned credos underscore grim realities: “Donate!” deals with the personal stakes of charity, as a factory worker becomes enmeshed in a relief fund set up for earthquake victims, and “The Crystal Sarcophagus” recounts the lengths to which a glass factory must go after it is tasked with the construction of Chairman Mao’s coffin. Though a few of Livings’s stories verge uneasily on allegory, masterpieces like “The Heir,” with its unflinching depiction of an aging Uighur gangster whose stranglehold on the community is threatened by government thugs, make this collection a socially complex and pitch-perfect account of modernization’s grueling aftermath.

Starred review from July 15, 2014
A debut collection of stories by anAmerican author about post-Mao China provides fresh perspective through itsunderstated, straightforward prose.These stories are sneaky, almostsubliminal, in their ambitions and connections. Almost all the protagonists andother characters are Chinese or at least indigenous to the region, with thelone exception of Claire, an American student in "The Pocketbook," who "savoredthe taste of the unsettled air between the two arenas of existence." For thereader and perhaps the author, these stories also seem to exist between twoarenas, not typically American nor authentically Chinese, but in a realm ofpossibility that invites similar savoring. Claire discovers that the streetsoutside her cloistered college aren't as safe as she might have thought, as a10-year-old expert robs her (and then himself falls victim to social Darwinismas he loses his spoils to older and tougher thugs), while Claire becomes caughtin a protest that she barely understands. Because the author writes so simply,and so well, the human complexities of these stories and the connections amongthem reveal themselves subtly rather than with great drama. None of the storiesare explicitly political, though "The Crystal Sarcophagus," the longest tale,illuminates what it means to live within a value system likely very differentfrom the reader's. With the death of Chairman Mao, the commission for hiscrystal coffin represents a great honor but also an impossible challenge, as itis decreed that a project that should take more than three years must becompleted in 10 months. "When completion of a task requires conditions that donot exist, create proper conditions!" orders the official from "[t]he Party[that] outranked physical laws, scientific fact, logic." Within all of thesestories, the human element provides the common denominator.Though Livings works as a journalist, hisfiction shows a whole lot more than moonlighting potential.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 1, 2014
Since its inception, in 1936, the Iowa Writers Workshop has trained an impressive number of authors who have made major contributions to American literature, from Flannery O'Connor to Jane Smiley. Livings is one recent program graduate whose first collection of short fiction, with its tales of volatile protagonists struggling to survive in contemporary China, should attract widespread attention and praise from literary critics. The Heir recounts the brutal fate awaiting the gay grandson of a crime lord from the Turkish ethnic group called the Uyghurs when the Chinese police descend on his neighborhood. The veteran journalist in Mountain of Swords, Sea of Fire is scooped by younger reporters wearing American fashions. In the title story, a Beijing couple barely making ends meet buys an illegal racing dog that later becomes a potential menu item in a family feast once its earning potential is spent. For Western audiences, any unfamiliarity with the Chinese locales and culture is quickly eased by Livings' imaginative yet realistic scenarios and vividly drawn characters. A brilliant and promising debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)