Synopses & Reviews
A powerful exploration of the Asian American experience, Hunger weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family into haunting tales of love and loss. The characters who inhabit this extraordinary collection are caught between the burden of their past and the fragility of their unchartered future. Hunger illuminates the experiences of first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and emotionally uprooted from their homeland, who mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment — and how their choices shape their children.
"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
"Moving and thought-provoking.... Chang's stories open up to readers a world of sadness and regret." — Chicago Tribune
Review
"A work of gorgeous, enduring prose." — Washington Post
Review
"Elegant.… A delicately calculated balance sheet of the losses and gains of immigrants whose lives are stretched between two radically different cultures." — The New York Times Book Review
Review
"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
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
Lan Samantha Chang is the author of three novels: The Family Chao, Inheritance, and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her work has been translated into nine languages. The director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she lives in Iowa City.