A sly debut story collection that conjures the experience of
adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New
York City--for readers of Zadie Smith and Helen Oyeyemi.
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize - Winner of the
PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction - Finalist for the New
York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker - NPR -
O: The Oprah Magazine - The Guardian - Esquire - New York -
BuzzFeed
A fresh new voice emerges with the arrival of Sour Heart, establishing
Jenny Zhang as a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant
experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and
continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in
Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during
the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups,
latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments
turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to
come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy
loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God.
Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives
as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat--dumpster diving
for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck--these
seven stories showcase Zhang's compassion, moral courage, and a perverse
sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy's Complaint. A darkly funny and
intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to
belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return
again.
Praise for Sour Heart
"[Jenny Zhang's] coming-of-age tales are coarse and funny, sweet and
sour, told in language that's rough-hewn yet pulsating with
energy."--USA Today
"One of the knockout fiction debuts of the year."--New York
"Compelling writing about what it means to be a teenager . . . It's
brilliant, it's dark, but it's also humorous and filled with
love."**--Isaac Fitzgerald, Today
"[A] combustible collection . . . in a class of its
own."--Booklist (starred review)
"Gorgeous and grotesque . . . [a] tremendous debut."--Slate
