Gish Jen - Fiction

Fiction

Several of her short stories have been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories. Her piece "Birthmates", was selected as one of The Best American Short Stories of The Century by John Updike. Her works include four novels: Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, and World and Town. She has also written a collection of short fiction, Who's Irish?.

Her first novel, Typical American, attempts to redefine Americanness as a preoccupation with identity. "As soon as you ask yourself the question, "What does it mean to be Irish-American, Iranian-American, Greek-American, you are American," she has said.

Her second novel, Mona in the Promised Land concerns the adoption of ethnicity; it features a Chinese-American adolescent who converts to Judaism. The Love Wife, her third novel, portrays an Asian American family with interracial parents and both biological and adopted children as "the new American family". She asks the question "What is a family?" as a way of asking, "What is a nation?"

The newest book, World and Town, portrays a fragile America, its small towns challenged by globalization, development, fundamentalism, and immigration, as well as the ripples sent out by 9/11. It poses the question, Can the center hold?

World and Town won the 2011 Massachusetts Book Prize in fiction and has been nominated for the 2012 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Jen's writing confounds categories like the "immigrant novel," probing societal constructions and boundaries of every stripe, and moving in a direction that seeks to enrich and even redefine what it means to be American.