Jenny Zhang

Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts. She questions the way we feminize and racialize nurturing, and live in service of other people's dreams. How we idealize birth and being baby, how it's only in our mothers' wombs that we're still considered innocent, blameless, and undamaged, because it's only then that we don't have to earn love. Her poems explore the obscenity of patriarchy, whiteness, and capitalism, the violence of rescue and heroism. The magic trick in My Baby First Birthday is that despite all these themes, the book never feels like some jeremiad. Zhang uses friendship as a lyric. She seeks tenderness, radiant beauty, and having love for your mistakes. Through all this, she writes about being alone--really alone, like why-was-I-ever-born alone--and trying, despite everything, to reach out and touch something--skin to skin, animal to animal.

On its 150th anniversary, four acclaimed authors offer personal reflections on their lifelong engagement with Louisa May Alcott's classic novel of girlhood and growing up. For the 150th anniversary of the publication of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Kate Bolick, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Jane Smiley explore their strong lifelong personal engagement with Alcott's novel--what it has meant to them and why it still matters. Each takes as her subject one of the four March sisters, reflecting on their stories and what they have to teach us about life. Kate Bolick finds parallels in oldest sister Meg's brush with glamour at the Moffats' ball and her own complicated relationship with clothes. Jenny Zhang confesses to liking Jo least among the sisters when she first read the novel as a girl, uncomfortable in finding so much of herself in a character she feared was too unfeminine. Carmen Maria Machado writes about the real-life tragedy of Lizzie Alcott, the inspiration for third sister Beth, and the horror story that can result from not being the author of your own life's narrative. And Jane Smiley rehabilitates the reputation of youngest sister Amy, whom she sees as a modern feminist role model for those of us who are, well, not like the fiery Jo. These four voices come together to form a deep, funny, far-ranging meditation on the power of great literature to shape our lives.

Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut FictionA Guardian, Nylon, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, Vulture and Shelf Awareness Book of the Year 2017'Relegate anything else you’re reading – there is no other book to be seen with now' The Times'Obscene, beautiful, moving' New YorkerCentred on a community of immigrants precariously balanced on the edge of poverty in 1990s New York City, the stories that make up Sour Heart examine the ways that family and history can weigh us down, but also lift us up. From the young woman coming to terms with her grandmother’s role in the Cultural Revolution, to the daughter struggling to understand where her family ends and she begins, these vibrant, raw and powerful stories introduce a bold and singular new voice.

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 AwardNAMED 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