"Wang's stories about a shifting modern China are never comfortable. They scratch like burlap, or like what I imagine empty sorghum sacks--which one character uses as luggage--feel like. They are unsettling, often brutal, sometimes tender, always plainspoken. . . . Yet as a storyteller, Wang's sensitivity is evident. Wang, who was born in the small coal-mining village of Fenyang in Shanxi Province and immigrated to the U.S. as a child, attends to the book's inquiries with heart." --The Carolina Quarterly

"Wang blends fictional towns and figures with real events, like the Tiananmen Square massacre, to construct a range of stories downright epic in scope. It is incredibly reductive to say that a country the size of China--or any country, for that matter--can be captured by a single book. But the characters in Wang's Further News of Defeat provide an engaging, wide-ranging look at a country where the only thing more common than family and tradition is change." >--Pittsburgh Quarterly

"In Further News of Defeat, Michael X. Wang reveals a remarkable ability to move fluidly through time periods and points of view, all with such a clear and vibrant voice--the stories then sing on a sentence level while also illuminating the world at large. There's big ambition here, but shown through these small moments and stylistic flourishes, and the combination is both graceful and exciting, a tumbling between micro and macro, between individual and society, scene and era." --Aimee Bender, author of An Invisible Sign of My Own

"These stories. . .reveal a specific perspective on love, loss, tragedy, and triumph. The characters seem to face drastic choices, and because he's a good storyteller, Wang doesn't lead them down the right paths, knowing there's a much better tale down the wrong turn." --Story366

"Michael X. Wang's Further News of Defeat is a collection of deeply researched and engrossing, wonderfully evocative and moving short stories about the people of a particular village in China and the migration of their descendants to urban centers and new lands. What's extraordinary about this book is how it also reads like a distilled epic bringing to life the great clash of tradition and progress in a half-century of dizzyingly rapid change in the world's most populous country. A beautiful, assured, and unforgettable debut." --Porter Shreve, author of The End of the Book