Hunger
A Novella and Stories
20 October 2023
Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.
Description
“A masterwork of enormous power.” —Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko
The searing debut of “one of the most influential writers in American letters…Hunger is a masterpiece, a necessary haunting” (Justin Torres, author of We the Animals).
A powerful exploration of the Asian American experience, Hunger weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family into poignant tales of love and loss. Celebrated author Lan Samantha Chang illuminates the lives of first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and emotionally uprooted from their homeland, who mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment—and shows how their choices shape their children. The characters who inhabit this extraordinary collection, “a work of gorgeous, enduring prose” (Helen C. Wan, Washington Post), are caught between the burden of their past and the fragility of their unchartered future.
Reviews
"[Lan Samantha Chang’s] stories constitute a delicately calculated balance sheet of the losses and gains of immigrants whose lives are stretched between two radically different cultures…Complex and rueful, her fiction gives voice to internal struggles, withheld catalogues of loss." — Claire Messud, New York Times Book Review
"Moving and thought-provoking…Chang’s stories open up to readers a world of sadness and regret." — Chicago Tribune
"Impeccable. . . . Delicately specific tales of Chinese immigrant life . . . capturing the universal struggles of the human heart. . . . So luminous is this collection, the result is something like a pearl." — San Diego Union-Tribune
"This remarkable first book has a deeply tragic sensibility, but it whispers its tragedy, thereby heightening it. Hunger evinces in many ways the quintessential voice of the immigrant, obscured by longings, distance and nostalgia, muted by language itself, yet resolutely insistent: These stories…will not be silenced." — Portland Oregonian
"In clear, often shining prose she paints the world of Asian-American immigrants…Hunger places Chang firmly among the group of novelists whose writing about lost homelands has received high acclaim: Oscar Hijeulos, Christina Garcia, Amy Tan, Edwige Danticat, Julia Alvarez, and Junot Diaz." — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"These radiant, heartbreaking, soul-touching tales form a working definition of all we hunger for. Lan Samantha Chang writes beautifully of the hungers of the heart: of desire, of ambition; of all we might be, and aren’t; of all we most want, and can’t have." — Andrea Barrett, author of Natural History
"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." — Margot Livesey, author of The Boy in the Field
"That Chang is able to evoke so nuanced a reaction is a testament to her unrelenting dramatic vision, her depth and subtlety of insight and her beautiful, merciless prose." — Boston Book Review
"Poignant…Chang is able to sketch quickly complex personalities caught in a ghetto-like emotional condition. [Her] descriptions recall Henry Roth’s or Bernard Malamud’s immigrant families of the turn of the century." — Philadelphia Inquirer
"Chang’s clear, crisp prose makes the everyday world of Chinese immigrants depicted in her short stories and novella one of great intensity." — Harvard Book Review
"A wonderfully written debut collection…with considerable insight and originality…somber, vivid, deeply original vision of Asian-American life…the debut of a writer possessing a distinctive, fresh imagination and voice." — Kirkus Reviews