“In Further News of Defeat, 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 The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake)

“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)

"What’s so exciting about his collection is how many tones and registers [Wang] can operate in.... 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)