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The twelve stories in Xuan Juliana Wang's remarkable debut collection capture the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth. A generation for whom the Cultural Revolution is a distant memory, WeChat is king and life glitters with the possibility of love, travel, technology, and, above all, new identities.
Whether at home or abroad, her stories catch their characters at the threshold of bold and uncertain futures, navigating between their cultural heritage and the chaos of contemporary life. In a crowded apartment on Mott Street, an immigrant family raises its first real Americans. At the Beijing Olympics, a pair of synchronized divers stand poised at the edge of success and self-discovery. And on a snowless New York evening, a father creates an algorithm to troubleshoot the problem of raising a daughter across an ever-widening gulf of cultures and generations.
From fuerdai ('second-generation-rich' kids) and livestream stars to a glass-swallowing qigong grandmaster, these stories upend the well-worn path of the immigrant experience to reveal a new face of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are and who they will one day become, in a world as vast and various as their ambitions.
In dexterous, electric prose, Xuan Juliana Wang's stories reveal a dazzling imagination and announce the arrival of a beguiling new voice in American fiction.
Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Nylon, Electric Literature, The Millions and Lithub
"Wang's stories are spare and haunting...A sharp and poignant collection." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Wang proves herself a promising writer with a delightfully playful voice and an uncanny ability to evoke empathy, nostalgia, and wonder." - Publishers Weekly
"Wang boldly explores what it means to be a Chinese millennial and seamlessly captures the longing of an emerging generation." - Booklist
"Artful, funny, generous and empathetic…a radiant new talent." - Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies
"These dazzling stories interrogate the fractures, collisions and glorious new alloys of what it means to be a Chinese Millennial." - Adam Johnson, author of The Orphan Master's Son
This information about Home Remedies was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and moved to Los Angeles when she was seven years old. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She lives in California.
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