Bøger af Gish Jen

Hattie Kong, a retired teacher and a descendant of Confucius, has decided that it's time to start over. She moves to the peaceful New England town of Riverlake, a place that once represented the rock-solid base of American life. Instead of quietude, Hattie discovers a town challenged by cell-phone towers, chain stores, and struggling farms. Soon Hattie is joined by an immigrant Cambodian family on the run, and-quite unexpectedly-Carter Hatch, a love from her past. As each character seeks to make a new start on life, World and Town asks deep, absorbing questions about religion, love, home, and meaning.

The acclaimed, award-winning author of The Resisters takes measure of the fifty years since the opening of China and its unexpected effects on the lives of ordinary people. It is a unique book that only Jen could write—a story collection accruing the power of a novel as it proceeds—a work that Cynthia Ozick has called “an art beyond art. It is life itself.”Beginning with a cheery letter penned by a Chinese girl in heaven to “poor Mr. Nixon” in hell, Gish Jen embarks on a fictional journey through U.S.-China relations, capturing the excitement of a world on the brink of tectonic change.Opal Chen reunites with her Chinese sisters after forty years; newly cosmopolitan Lulu Koo wonders why Americans “like to walk around in the woods with the mosquitoes”; and Hong Kong parents go to extreme lengths to reestablish contact with their “number-one daughter” in New York.With their profound compassion and equally profound humor, these stories trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history. Delightful, provocative, and powerful, Thank You, Mr. Nixon captures an extraordinary era in an extraordinary way. A book only Gish Jen could write, it furnishes yet more proof of her eminent place among American storytellers.

From the massively talented Gish Jen comes a barbed, moving, and stylistically dazzling new novel about the elusive nature of kinship. The Wongs describe themselves as a "half half” family, but the actual fractions are more complicated, given Carnegie's Chinese heritage, his wife Blondie's WASP background, and the various ethnic permutations of their adopted and biological children. Into this new American family comes a volatile new member.Her name is Lanlan. She is Carnegie's Mainland Chinese relative, a tough, surprisingly lovely survivor of the Cultural Revolution, who comes courtesy of Carnegie's mother's will. Is Lanlan a very good nanny, a heartless climber, or a posthumous gift from a formidable mother who never stopped wanting her son to marry a nice Chinese girl? Rich in insight, buoyed by humor, The Love Wife is a hugely satisfying work.

Drawing on a rich array of sources, including her father's striking account of his childhood in China, Tiger Writing not only illuminates Gish Jen's work but explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self-each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world.