Hunger; A Novella and Stories

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. Jane Yeomans (Jacket Photograph) and Linda Cicero. Format is approximately 5.25 inches by 8 inches. 191, [1] pages. Signed by the author on the title page. Chapters cover Hunger; Water Names; San; The Unforgetting; The Eve of the Spirit Festival; Pipa's Story; and Acknowledgments. Lan Samantha Chang writes superbly about the intricacies of exile, and especially about women in exile, caught between the present and the past, their husbands and their children. Hunger is a wonderfully accomplished first collection from a writer whose work we will be reading for many years to come. These stories reveal the lives of immigrant families haunted by lost loves. The characters, whose culture and families have been lost to the forces of history, mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment. In luminous prose. Lan Samantha Chang shows how history impinges upon family love, as she explores the profound and painful ties between husband and wife, parent and child, sister and sister. A ghost seduces a young girl into a flooded river. A mother commands a daughter to avenge her father's death. The title novella is told by a woman whose love for an exiled musician compels her into a tragic marriage; her husband's unfulfilled desires nearly destroy their children. Again and again, Chang asks the question: Is ordinary love not a kind of burden, stifling and terrifying in the choices and responsibilities it forces on us? And yet we yearn for it, suffer for it, define ourselves by our experience of it, cannot live without it Lan Samantha Chang is an American writer of novels and short stories. She worked in publishing in New York City briefly before getting her MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford. She is currently the Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor in the Arts at the University of Iowa and the Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the first woman, and the first Asian American, to hold that position. Chang's first book is a novella and short stories, titled Hunger (1998). The stories are set in the US and China, and they explore home, family, and loss. The New York Times Book Review called it "Elegant.... A delicately calculated balance sheet of the losses and gains of immigrants whose lives are stretched between two radically different cultures." The Washington Post called it "A work of gorgeous, enduring prose." Chang has received fellowships from MacDowell, the American Library in Paris, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Not since Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan has a fiction writer explored with such powerful intensity the experience of being Asian American. The characters who inhabit this extraordinary fictional debut are caught between the burden of their past history and the fragility of their uncharted future. Hunger illuminates how first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and emotionally uprooted from their homeland, mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment and how the past affects and shapes their children. In luminous prose, these moving stories of love and loss explore the profound and painful ties between husband and wife, parent and child, sister and sister. In other stories, a ghost seduces a young girl into a flooded river; a mother commands a daughter to avenge her father's death. Lan Samantha Chang weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family, into haunting tales.