Gish Jen
Birth date: August 12, 1955
Gish Jen's Books
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The title is a misnomer. Not that there aren't some wonderful stories here, but they were never really chosen because they're the best American short stories of the 20th century. Rather, these are Updike's 56 picks out of the 2,000 stories originally chosen in the 84 volumes of a yearly anthology pu...
Gish Jen's Typical American surveys a broad range of immigrant Chinese American experience, and is populated by round, psychologically complex characters interacting in believable and striking ways. Jen's flaw as an author might only be a flaw of the Chinese American community itself, a tendency to ...
Really, ultimately disappointing. The interludes from other characters just served as a distraction: really the story is all Hattie's. And I'm not entirely shure what Jen is trying for with this novel. I liked the part where Hattie is trying to cope with her current life and her Chinese heritage, an...
There are some interesting essays in here, but also some not-so-interesting ones. And some shitty ones, like the one on Huck Finn that gets exactly everything wrong. It's an uneven collection. Worthwhile if you can find it used.
I made five attempts at reading this book, borrowing it from the library each time. I could never finish it. It was so clumsily written with different narratives that I just couldn't get in to the rhythm of who was saying what and why. Had this been a normal book, written in a normal format, then...
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