Who's Irish?: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

Gish Jen

$15.00

Publication Date: June 13th, 2000

Publisher:

Vintage

ISBN:

9780375705922

Pages:

224

Description

In this dazzling collection of short stories, the award-winning author of the acclaimed novels Thank You, Mr. Nixon and Mona in the Promised Land—presents a "sparkling ... gently satiric look at the American Dream and its fallout on those who pursue it" (The New York Times).

The stories in Who's Irish? show us the children of immigrants looking wonderingly at their parents' efforts to assimilate, while the older generation asks how so much selfless hard work on their part can have yielded them offspring who'd sooner drop out of life than succeed at it.

With dazzling wit and compassion, Gish Jen looks at ambition and compromise at century's end and finds that much of the action is as familiar—and as strange—as the things we know to be most deeply true about ourselves.

About the Author

GISH JEN is the author of four novels, a book of stories, and two books of nonfiction, The Girl at the Baggage Claim and Tiger Writing. Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for fiction and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She teaches from time to time in China and otherwise lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Praise for Who's Irish?: Stories (Vintage Contemporaries)

"Jen's gift is for comedy that resonates, and sadnesses that arise with perfect timing from absurdities. Her subject matter is so appealing, it almost obscures the power and suppleness of her language." —The New York Times Book Review

"Gish Jen's fiction is always engaging, always necessary." —Newsday

“Nobody’s having more fun with American diversity than Gish Jen. . . . One of the greatest charms of her fiction is her position as a bemused chronicler . . . of the hugely comic potential in human nature.” —The Boston Globe

"Sparkling—a gently satiric look at the American Dream and its fallout on those who pursue it." —The New York Times

"Tender and funny . . . vibrant and courageous." —San Francisco Chronicle