Tiger Writing

Gish Jen

“These pieces are as entertaining as they are insightful. Jen’s readers will undoubtedly love them, and those new to her work should consider them as well.”—Mark Manivong, Library Journal

“[A] thoughtful—and often witty—volume… Jen raises important questions about how we fashion our own stories and how cultural differences influence that process.”—Publishers Weekly

“Gish Jen is the Great American Novelist we’re always hearing about, and in Tiger Writing she delivers a profound meditation on the divergent roles that storytelling, artmaking, and selfhood take on across the East–West divide. Penetrating, inspired, and, yes, indispensable.”—Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“In a magnificent feat of integration, Tiger Writing honors the becoming of the Chinese American writer. I am proud, proud, proud to share ancestors—and the novel and the world—with Gish Jen. Oh, and the wonderful faith—that the novel can be learned!”—Maxine Hong Kingston, author of To Be the Poet

“Tiger Writing is both precise and intimate, a terrific contribution to our understanding of the artist’s lot in the East and in the West.”—Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story

“How to balance the competing claims of social order and self-determination? It’s a question that all novelists must grapple with, and Jen, drawing on extensive research in the social sciences as well as her own vividly-rendered biography, gives us an entirely new answer. The result is a strikingly original—and compellingly personal—account of the novel as a genre.”—Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard University

“Blending family memoir, cultural criticism, and reflections on her own life as a writer, Gish Jen makes a compelling case for the novel as a meeting-ground of typically American themes of independence with classically Asian ideals of interdependence. Tiger Writing is a rare case of a book on writing that itself is a joy to read.”—David Damrosch, author of What Is World Literature?

Related Links

• See a schedule of Gish Jen’s upcoming appearances »
• Read Gish Jen’s contribution to a New York Times “Room for Debate” forum on how those who immigrate to the U.S. become “Americans”

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