Understanding Gish Jen

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Understanding Gish Jen

Author : Jennifer Ann Ho
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1611175895
Total Pages : 145 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (111 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Gish Jen by : Jennifer Ann Ho

Download or read book Understanding Gish Jen written by Jennifer Ann Ho and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2015-11-30 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jennifer Ann Ho introduces readers to a "typical American" writer, Gish Jen, the author of four novels, Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, and World and Town; a collection of short stories, Who's Irish?; and a collection of lectures, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self. Jen writes with an engaging, sardonic, and imaginative voice illuminating themes common to the American experience: immigration, assimilation, individualism, the freedom to choose one's path in life, and the complicated relationships that we have with our families and our communities. A second-generation Chinese American, Jen is widely recognized as an important American literary voice, at once accessible, philosophical, and thought-provoking. In addition to her novels, she has published widely in periodicals such as the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Yale Review. Ho traces the evolution of Jen's career, her themes, and the development of her narrative voice. In the process she shows why Jen's observations about life in the United States, though revealed through the perspectives of her Asian American and Asian immigrant characters, resonate with a variety of audiences who find themselves reflected in Jen's accounts of love, grief, desire, disappointment, and the general domestic experiences that shape all our lives. Following a brief biographical sketch, Ho examines each of Jen's major works, showing how she traces the transformation of immigrant dreams into mundane life, explores the limits of self-identification, and characterizes problems of cross-national communication alongside the universal problems of aging and generational conflict. Looking beyond Jen's fiction work, a final chapter examines her essays and her concerns and stature as a public intellectual, and detailed primary and secondary bibliographies provide a valuable point of departure for both teaching and future scholarship.

The Resisters

Author : Gish Jen
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0525657215
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (256 download)

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Book Synopsis The Resisters by : Gish Jen

Download or read book The Resisters written by Gish Jen and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2020 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Resisters is palpably loving, smart, funny, and desperately unsettling. The novel should be required reading for the country both as a cautionary tale and because it is a stone-cold masterpiece. This is Gish Jen's moment. She has pitched a perfect game." --Ann Patchett The time: not so long from now. The place: AutoAmerica. The land: half under water. The Internet: one part artificial intelligence, one part surveillance technology, and oddly human--even funny. The people: Divided. The angel-fair "Netted" have jobs, and literally occupy the high ground. The "Surplus" live on swampland if they're lucky, on water if they're not. The story: To a Surplus couple--he once a professor, she still a lawyer--is born a Blasian girl with a golden arm. At two, Gwen is hurling her stuffed animals from the crib; by ten, she can hit whatever target she likes. Her teens find her happily playing in an underground baseball league. When AutoAmerica rejoins the Olympics, though--with a special eye on beating ChinRussia--Gwen attracts interest. Soon she finds herself playing ball with the Netted even as her mother challenges the very foundations of this divided society. A moving and important story of an America that seems ever more possible, The Resisters is also the story of one family struggling to maintain its humanity and normalcy in circumstances that threaten their every value--as well as their very existence. Extraordinary and ordinary, charming and electrifying, this is Gish Jen at her most irresistible.

Tiger Writing

Author : Gish Jen
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674072839
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (74 download)

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Book Synopsis Tiger Writing by : Gish Jen

Download or read book Tiger Writing written by Gish Jen and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-25 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In three pieces originally delivered as special lectures, draws on the biography of the author's father as well as the evolution of her own work to contrast Western and Eastern ideas of self-narration and interdependency.

Typical American

Author : Gish Jen
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 0547524099
Total Pages : 307 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (475 download)

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Book Synopsis Typical American by : Gish Jen

Download or read book Typical American written by Gish Jen and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “irresistible novel” of Chinese immigrants navigating the American dream is “startling [and] heartrending, without ever losing its comic touch” (Entertainment Weekly). Gish Jen reinvents the American immigrant story through the Chang family, who first come to the United States with no intention of staying. But when the Communists assume control of China in 1949, Ralph Chang, his sister Theresa, and his wife Helen find themselves in a crisis, struggling to cling to their old-world ideas of themselves. But soon they begin to dream the American dream of self-invention. They transform, poignantly and ironically, from people who disparage all that is “typical American” to people who aspire to the American ideal. With droll humor and a deep empathy for her characters, Gish Jen creates a superbly engrossing story that sparkles with wit while challenging the reader to reconsider what it means to be a typical American. “No paraphrase could capture the intelligence of Gish Jen’s prose, its epigrammatic sweep and swiftness . . . . The author just keeps coming at you line after stunning line.” —The New York Times Book Review

Who's Irish?

Author : Gish Jen
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307826546
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Who's Irish? by : Gish Jen

Download or read book Who's Irish? written by Gish Jen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-08-29 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dazzling collection of short stories, the award-winning author of the acclaimed novels Thank You, Mr. Nixon and Mona in the Promised Land—presents a "sparkling ... gently satiric look at the American Dream and its fallout on those who pursue it" (The New York Times). The stories in Who's Irish? show us the children of immigrants looking wonderingly at their parents' efforts to assimilate, while the older generation asks how so much selfless hard work on their part can have yielded them offspring who'd sooner drop out of life than succeed at it. With dazzling wit and compassion, Gish Jen looks at ambition and compromise at century's end and finds that much of the action is as familiar—and as strange—as the things we know to be most deeply true about ourselves.

Mona in the Promised Land

Author : Gish Jen
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307826589
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis Mona in the Promised Land by : Gish Jen

Download or read book Mona in the Promised Land written by Gish Jen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-08-29 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed, award-winning author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon comes a “hilariously funny and seriously important” novel (Amy Tan) about American multiculturalism and a Chinese American teenager doing her best to fit in–even if it means converting to Judaism. In these pages, acclaimed author Gish Jen introduces us to teenaged Mona Chang, who in 1968 moves with her newly prosperous family to Scarshill, New York. Here, the Chinese are seen as "the new Jews." What could be more natural than for Mona to take this literally—even to the point of converting? As Mona attends temple "rap" sessions and falls in love (with a nice Jewish boy who lives in a tepee), Jen introduces us to one of the most charming and sweet-spirited heroines in recent fiction, a girl who can wisecrack with perfect aplomb even when she's organizing the help in her father's pancake house. On every page, Gish Jen sets our received notions spinning with a wit as dry as a latter-day Jane Austen's.

The Love Wife

Author : Gish Jen
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1400043794
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis The Love Wife by : Gish Jen

Download or read book The Love Wife written by Gish Jen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2004-09-14 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the massively talented, award-winning author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon comes “a big story ... about families and identity and race and the American Dream.... Jen’s most ambitious and emotionally ample work yet” (The New York Times). 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.

Thank You, Mr. Nixon

Author : Gish Jen
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0593319907
Total Pages : 231 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis Thank You, Mr. Nixon by : Gish Jen

Download or read book Thank You, Mr. Nixon written by Gish Jen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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”; Hong Kong parents go to extreme lengths to reestablish contact with their “number-one daughter” in New York; and Betty Koo, brought up on “no politics, just make money,” finds she must reassess her mother’s philosophy. With their profound compassion and equally profound humor, these eleven linked stories trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history, capturing an extraordinary era in an extraordinary way. Delightful, provocative, and powerful, Thank You, Mr. Nixon furnishes yet more proof of Gish Jen’s eminent place among American storytellers.

Conversations with Gish Jen

Author : John Zheng
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN 13 : 1496819365
Total Pages : 189 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (968 download)

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Book Synopsis Conversations with Gish Jen by : John Zheng

Download or read book Conversations with Gish Jen written by John Zheng and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conversations with Gish Jen is the first collection of interviews with the renowned contemporary American author Gish Jen (b. 1955), whose acclaimed fiction and nonfiction have fascinated American readers for more than thirty years. The conversations in this book offer first-hand information not only about Jen’s authorial intentions, but also about her life as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. Spanning more than two decades, beginning in 1991 and ending with a new, unpublished interview from 2017, these interviews provide readers a sense of Jen’s development as a novelist and cultural critic. Jen’s insights into the merits and drawbacks of Eastern and Western cultures, including American individualism and exceptionalism and Asian interdependent mindset and living principles, provide us with keys to understanding the identity struggles of the author herself as well as her fictional characters. The comparative approach Jen adopts in her comments on such topics as education, politics, business, religion, and concepts of creativity and success provokes readers to reflect on their relationships with themselves, with the society in which they live, and with the rest of the world. At the heart of these conversations is Jen’s sense of humor, which makes the book a joyful read for both scholars and casual fans of her work.

Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels

Author : Jennifer Ho
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135469121
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (354 download)

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Book Synopsis Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels by : Jennifer Ho

Download or read book Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels written by Jennifer Ho and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary study examines the theme of consumption in Asian American literature, connection representations of cooking and eating with ethnic identity formation. Using four discrete modes of identification--historic pride, consumerism, mourning, and fusion--Jennifer Ho examines how Asian American adolescents challenge and revise their cultural legacies and experiment with alternative ethnic affiliations through their relationships to food.

The Interethnic Imagination

Author : Caroline Rody
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0195377362
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (953 download)

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Book Synopsis The Interethnic Imagination by : Caroline Rody

Download or read book The Interethnic Imagination written by Caroline Rody and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rody proposes a new paradigm for understanding the changing terrain of contemporary fiction. She claims that what we have long read as ethnic literature is in the process of becoming 'interethnic'. Examining an extensive range of Asian American fictions, she offers readings of three especially compelling examples.

The Best American Short Stories of the Century

Author : John Updike
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 810 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (321 download)

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Book Synopsis The Best American Short Stories of the Century by : John Updike

Download or read book The Best American Short Stories of the Century written by John Updike and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 810 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The incomparable John Updike selects the 55 finest short stories from America's bestselling anthology, published since 1915.

Understanding Gish Jen

Author : Jennifer Ann Ho
Publisher : Understanding Contemporary Ame
ISBN 13 : 9781611175882
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (758 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Gish Jen by : Jennifer Ann Ho

Download or read book Understanding Gish Jen written by Jennifer Ann Ho and published by Understanding Contemporary Ame. This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the evolution of Jen's career, her themes, and the development of her narrative voice

The Leavers (National Book Award Finalist)

Author : Lisa Ko
Publisher : Algonquin Books
ISBN 13 : 161620804X
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (162 download)

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Book Synopsis The Leavers (National Book Award Finalist) by : Lisa Ko

Download or read book The Leavers (National Book Award Finalist) written by Lisa Ko and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE 2017 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION Named a Best Book of 2017 by NPR, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, BuzzFeed, Bustle, and Electric Literature “There was a time I would have called Lisa Ko’s novel beautifully written, ambitious, and moving, and all of that is true, but it’s more than that now: if you want to understand a forgotten and essential part of the world we live in, The Leavers is required reading.” —Ann Patchett, author of Commonwealth Lisa Ko’s powerful debut, The Leavers, is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice. One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, Polly, an undocumented Chinese immigrant, goes to her job at a nail salon—and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left mystified and bereft. Eventually adopted by a pair of well-meaning white professors, Deming is moved from the Bronx to a small town upstate and renamed Daniel Wilkinson. But far from all he’s ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his adoptive parents’ desire that he assimilate with his memories of his mother and the community he left behind. Told from the perspective of both Daniel—as he grows into a directionless young man—and Polly, Ko’s novel gives us one of fiction’s most singular mothers. Loving and selfish, determined and frightened, Polly is forced to make one heartwrenching choice after another. Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid examination of borders and belonging. It’s a moving story of how a boy comes into his own when everything he loves is taken away, and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of the past.

Little Gods

Author : Meng Jin
Publisher : HarperCollins
ISBN 13 : 0062935976
Total Pages : 307 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (629 download)

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Book Synopsis Little Gods by : Meng Jin

Download or read book Little Gods written by Meng Jin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD “Compellingly complex…Expands the future of the immigrant novel even as it holds us in uneasy thrall to the past.” – Gish Jen, New York Times Book Review Combining the emotional resonance of Home Fire with the ambition and innovation of Asymmetry, a lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel that explores the complex web of grief, memory, time, physics, history, and selfhood in the immigrant experience, and the complicated bond between daughters and mothers. On the night of June Fourth, a woman gives birth in a Beijing hospital alone. Thus begins the unraveling of Su Lan, a brilliant physicist who until this moment has successfully erased her past, fighting what she calls the mind’s arrow of time. When Su Lan dies unexpectedly seventeen years later, it is her daughter Liya who inherits the silences and contradictions of her life. Liya, who grew up in America, takes her mother’s ashes to China—to her, an unknown country. In a territory inhabited by the ghosts of the living and the dead, Liya’s memories are joined by those of two others: Zhu Wen, the woman last to know Su Lan before she left China, and Yongzong, the father Liya has never known. In this way a portrait of Su Lan emerges: an ambitious scientist, an ambivalent mother, and a woman whose relationship to her own past shapes and ultimately unmakes Liya’s own sense of displacement. A story of migrations literal and emotional, spanning time, space and class, Little Gods is a sharp yet expansive exploration of the aftermath of unfulfilled dreams, an immigrant story in negative that grapples with our tenuous connections to memory, history, and self.

A Song Everlasting

Author : Ha Jin
Publisher : Pantheon
ISBN 13 : 152474879X
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (247 download)

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Book Synopsis A Song Everlasting by : Ha Jin

Download or read book A Song Everlasting written by Ha Jin and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the universally admired, National Book Award-winning, bestselling author of Waiting—a timely novel that follows a famous Chinese singer severed from his country, as he works to find his way in the United States At the end of a U.S. tour with his state-supported choir, popular singer Yao Tian takes a private gig in New York to pick up some extra cash for his daughter’s tuition fund, but the consequences of his choice spiral out of control. On his return to China, Tian is informed that the sponsors of the event were supporters of Taiwan’s secession, and that he must deliver a formal self-criticism. When he is asked to forfeit his passport to his employer, Tian impulsively decides instead to return to New York to protest the government’s threat to his artistic integrity. With the help of his old friend Yabin, Tian’s career begins to flourish in the United States. But he is soon placed on a Chinese government blacklist and thwarted by the state at every turn, and it becomes increasingly clear that he may never return to China unless he denounces the freedoms that have made his new life possible. Tian nevertheless insists on his identity as a performer, refusing to give up his art. Moving, important, and strikingly relevant to our times, A Song Everlasting is a story of hope in the face of hardship from one of our most celebrated authors.

Contemporary American Fiction

Author : David Brauner
Publisher : Edinburgh Critical Guides to L
ISBN 13 : 9780748622689
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (226 download)

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Book Synopsis Contemporary American Fiction by : David Brauner

Download or read book Contemporary American Fiction written by David Brauner and published by Edinburgh Critical Guides to L. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of contemporary American fiction discusses work by critically-acclaimed authors such as Philip Roth, Annie Proulx and Paul Auster and situates them in a range of literary-historical contexts. It identifies trends in recent American fiction and analyzes the main developments in critical thinking of the last 20 years.