Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
Gish Jen has published short work in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and dozens of other periodicals, anthologies and textbooks. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories four times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Nominated for a National Book Critics' Circle Award, her work was featured in a PBS American Masters' special on the American novel and is widely taught.
Jen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living; she has also delivered the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University. The Resisters is her eighth book.
Gish Jen's website
This bio was last updated on 01/17/2020. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
The Love Wife is your third novel. How might this book
surprise readers of your previous novels, Typical American and Mona
in the Promised Land? What surprised you?
The Love Wife is not about the Chang family, for one thing.
Also this book is, I hate to say more middle-aged, but that's probably
the truth. I've lived through more, and it shows.
At the same time, what really surprised me about The Love Wife was,
paradoxically, how young I felt, writing it. In my non-writing
life, I felt tired and stressed and a shadow of my younger self in most every
respect. In my writing life, though, all of that seemed to fall away: This
novel wrote itself and wrote itself as if it did not realize its author got no
sleep and no exercise and could barely remember what year it was. I
could not have been more amazed and grateful.
The novel is told in the different voices of the Wong family. Why
did you decide to write the novel in this form?
The novel came to me this way–as if told by the various Wongs at a
very long family therapy session, only without the therapist, and with
license, it seems, to ...
Anthony Veasna So (1992-2020) was a graduate of Stanford University and earned his MFA in fiction at Syracuse University. His writing has appeared in or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, n+1, Granta, and ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
Thank You, Mr. Nixon
Try:
Afterparties
by Anthony Veasna So
Megan Angelo grew up in Quakertown, Pennsylvania and graduated from Villanova University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Glamour and Elle, among other publications. She lives in ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Resisters
Try:
Followers
by Megan Angelo
We recommend 22 similar authors
The Last Russian Doll
by Kristen Loesch
A haunting epic of betrayal, revenge, and redemption following three generations of Russian women.
Once We Were Home
by Jennifer Rosner
From the author of The Yellow Bird Sings, a novel based on the true stories of children stolen in the wake of World War II.
Last House Before the Mountain by Monika Helfer
A spellbinding, internationally bestselling family saga set in a fractured rural village in WWI Austria.
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
