Hunger: A Novella and Stories [Paperback]

Lan Samantha Chang (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 2009

“Spare and haunting tales that ask ordinary questions about that extraordinary emotion: love.”—Chicago Tribune

The novella and five stories that make up this collection 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 in the title novella, a woman speaks from beyond the grave about her tragic marriage to an exiled musician whose own disappointments nearly destroyed their two daughters.

Editorial Reviews

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 )

“A work of gorgeous, enduring prose.” (Washington Post )

“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 )

About the Author

Lan Samantha Chang's fiction has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Story and The Best American Short Stories 1994 and 1996. Chang is the author of the award-winning books Hunger and Inheritance, and the novel All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. She is the recipient of the Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote fellowships at Stanford University. She also received, from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, a Teaching-Writing fellowship and a Michener-Copernicus fellowship. Her many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where she directs the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (September 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393337952
• ISBN-13: 978-0393337952
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #116,998 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intimate stories with resonant themes, November 14, 2001

By 

Jayne MacManus (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hunger (Paperback)

"Hunger" is the opening novella and anchor for this collection of short stories. Chang is a graceful author with just the right touch of sensitivity and insight into the lives of Chinese immigrants in America. The special talent here is in the individual attention Chang gives to each family, each story. This is not a social history portrayal of the masses. While the family structures are seemingly uniform (husband and wife and one or two children) and the range of vocations unsurprising (restaurant workers, music prodigies, math and tech specialists), the characters are more emotionally dimensional than one would suspect.

*** The theme of hunger is the dramatic thread running through all the stories -- hunger for personal expression, parental acceptance or love, or independence. The immigrant experience is a poignant paradox of being closely tied to one's family or home and yet feeling the fierce need to pull away in order to succeed. The ultimate hunger becomes not one extreme or the other, but in wanting both polar opposites to work at once. It is an impossible hunger to satisfy and yet continually churning at the core of every character.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars *~ i DeEpLy aDmiRe LaN SaMaNthA cHanG's WoRk ~*, May 28, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Hunger (Paperback)

Two words...Thank you! I myself am a Chinese-American girl and strive to be a writer. I have lately become more and more interested in looking into the work of Chinese-American authors, and found her book in the bookstore while trying to think of every Chinese last name I could! The book I found was the last copy they had, but I have no regrets in buying it! It's a book full of stories that really and truly capture what it's like for Chinese immigrants to come to America and find Americanized everything. To be honest, everyone loves the famous author Amy Tan...but I think Chang outdoes her in many aspects!

Her style for one is beyond Tan's. While Amy Tan writes with primitive simpleness (basically, a way that any person can write) Chang writes intelligently and intellectually. She is someone who not only wrote this story for the surface meaning of it, but there is hidden depth and philosophy.

What i liked the most, is that she didn't use the same basic Chinese stereotypes that every Chinese-American author usually uses such as the "ah"s at the end of every name, the overdone superstition of ghosts, etc. She reveals knowledge in her writing and is the first author who I have seen reveal the Chinese culture for what it REALLY is. I hope she writes more books, because I would buy them all in a heartbeat! Thank you so much. I strive to do what she has done for me! Enjoy every page of what she has written with the utmost admiration and respect.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous, February 18, 2000

By 

"rcpva" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hunger (Paperback)

These stories are wonderful--highly recommended. Chang's sentences are gorgeous, and her observations are moving. Her characters are well-rounded and complicated, and their plights are sympathetic--the kind of characters that stay with you. The stories are a fine balance of subtlety and utter stark clarity.