Hunger: A Novella and Stories

by Lan Samantha Chang

Book Overview

In luminous prose, these moving stories of love and loss explore the profound and painful ties between husband and wife, parent and child, sister and sister. The stunning title novella is told by a woman whose love for an exiled musician compels her into a tragic marriage in which her husband's unfulfilled desires nearly destroy their children. In other stories, a ghost seduces a young girl into a flooded river; a mother commands a daughter to avenge...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393046648
• ISBN13: 9780393046649
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.73 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.1"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Fabulous

These stories are wonderful--highly recommended. Chang's sentences are gorgeous, and her observations are moving. Her characters are well-rounded and complicated, and their plights are sympathetic--the kind of characters that stay with you. The stories are a fine balance of subtlety and utter stark clarity.

Marvelous and haunting

Chang's stories are about love, memory and all the things that remain unspoken within families. The stories beautifully evoke the wrenching pain of leaving home--the pain of immigrant Chinese parents starting anew in America and the pain of their children, whose inevitable departures underline their parents' rootlessness and loss.

Very good character interaction and development

In the main story, Chang gives us a glimpse of a very private individual and his inability to come to terms with his daughter's development. It is a very well constructed view of immigrant life and the isolation it produces and the strenght of the characters in the novel to surpass their problems.

Hunger as a new voice

I really enjoyed Hunger. It was refreshing in its use precise, knife-like imagery and I loved the gaps that appeared between the people, small spaces that crumbled into ravines--the natural disintegration between wives and husbands, children and parents, language itself--all these are richly and painfully explored here. I think it is different from the other asian american writers I have read so far in that it seems to well from that painful blank spot in our childhoods, the place where so many things happen and are unspeakable because they seem unsolvable. She offers no easy solution to the dilemmas at hand but explores the possibilities through each character, man, woman, child. No one's viewpoint is disregarded. It is not merely the mother and daughter speaking. It is wider and deeper than this. Lastly, it brings in the world of music most vividly and honestly. Hunger, for me, rings true.

Terrific

These stories are engaging, moving and beautiful. The prose is evocative, creating visual images with just a few words that draw you in and make the stories come alive. The characters could be any of us, as they struggle to follow their hearts while they are grounded in a sometimes invisible web of relationships that confine them yet give them strength. This was a hard book to put down.