Jack 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. Livings, an American who both taught and studied in China, has written a series of stories which in their range and sympathetic detail present a convincing portrait of a country the West all too often treats as homogenous, and inscrutable with it.
