These mostly adolescent female narrators attempt to make sense of their histories as passed down through possibly unreliable stories told to them by their elders. The daughter of two struggling immigrants recounts the early days of her family's move from China to Brooklyn in 'We Love You Crispina,' meticulously detailing the many hardships involved in starting out with nothing in a foreign place. The first collection of short stories by poet and essayist Zhang (Dear Jenny, We Are All Find) highlights the intersections between several Chinese and Taiwanese immigrant families living in and around New York City, all of whom are trying to bridge the gap between the old world they've left behind forever altered by the Cultural Revolution and the new lives that they are now trying to build for themselves in the United States. in a class of its own.” -Booklist (starred review) It’s brilliant, it’s dark, but it’s also humorous and filled with love.” -Isaac Fitzgerald, Today “Compelling writing about what it means to be a teenager. “One of the knockout fiction debuts of the year.” -New York

“ coming-of-age tales are coarse and funny, sweet and sour, told in language that’s rough-hewn yet pulsating with energy.” - USA Today Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat-dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck-these seven stories showcase Zhang’s compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy’s Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker Ī fresh new voice emerges with the arrival of Sour Heart, establishing Jenny Zhang as a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award.Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A sly debut story collection that conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City-for readers of Zadie Smith and Helen Oyeyemi.

Sour heart zhang