Hunger

Book Description:

An award-winning novella and stories that beautifully illuminate the Chinese immigrant experience.
Nominated for numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and PEN Center USA-West’s annual literary award, this debut collection by a young Chinese-American writer has garnered stellar reviews and invited comparisons to Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. These stories reveal the lives of immigrant families haunted by lost loves: a ghost seduces a young girl into a flooded river; a mother commands a daughter to avenge her father’s death; and a woman speaks from beyond the grave about her tragic marriage to a man whose own disappointments nearly destroy their two daughters. In luminous prose Lan Samantha Chang weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family, into haunting tales that signal the arrival of an exciting new writer and "a work of gorgeous, enduring prose" (The Washington Post).
"Elegant . . . her stories constitute 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
"Impeccable. . . . So luminous is this collection, the result is something like a pearl."-- San Diego Union-Tribune
Hunger won the Bay Area Reviewers Book Award for Fiction, a Silver Medal in the California Book Awards, and the Wisconsin Public Library Association’s Banta Award
Chang’s work has twice been selected to appear in the Best American Short Stories anthology
Hunger appeared on the Wordstock bestseller list