Peter Hessler is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he served as Beijing correspondent from 2000-2007 and Cairo correspondent from 2011-2016. He is also a contributing writer for National Geographic. He is the author of River Town, which won the Kiriyama Book Prize, Oracle Bones, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Country Driving, and Strange Stones. He won the 2008 National Magazine Award for excellence in reporting, and he was named a MacArthur fellow in 2011.

• 1: Rejection 2: The Old Campus 3: The New Campus 4: Chengdu Experimental 5: Earthquake 6: The City Suspended 7: Children of the Corona 8: The Sealed City 9: Involution 10: Common Sense 11: Generation Xi Epilogue: The Uncompahgre River

Memorable... Over more than 400 pages, what emerges is a portrait of a country contoured but not defined by politics and economics... [Hessler is] an author and journalist who has long been one of its most astute and sensitive foreign observers.