Hunger

'A work of gorgeous, enduring prose' Washington Post

'Luminously elegiac stories... Complex and rueful... gives voice to internal struggles, catalogues of loss' New York Times Book Review

A modern classic of American fiction: a haunting collection of stories that explore the lost loves and complex desires of Chinese-American immigrant families

The novella and five stories that make up this collection tell of displaced lives, and exiled imaginations. Far away from their ancestral home, a grandmother tells her granddaughters stories of their river ancestors. Having relocated to the American Midwest, a young couple purposefully drive all remnants of their lives in China into the shadows. In the title novella, a woman recounts her tragic marriage to an exiled musician, whose own disappointments nearly destroy their two daughters.

In exquisitely crisp, spare and subtle prose, Lan Samantha Chang untangles how an immigrant can hunger for love, for acceptance, and for what they have left behind. An undeniable classic of modern American literature, Hunger is a haunting collection of stories, suffused with quiet beauty and longing.

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of the award-winning books Hunger and Inheritance, and the novel All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her work has been translated into nine languages and has been chosen twice for The Best American Short Stories. A recent Berlin Prize winner, she has received creative writing fellowships from Stanford University, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Samantha lives in Iowa City, where she is director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her most recent novel, The Family Chao, is also published by Pushkin Press and was one of Barack Obama's Books of Summer 2022.