Gish Jen is the author of many books, including the novel Typical American, a finalist for the National Book Critics' Circle Award, Mona in the Promised Land, World and Town, Who's Irish? Stories, The Love Wife, and Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self.
Novelist Gish Jen talked to Alice Munro’s two closest editors, Ann Close and Chip McGrath, about the beloved Canadian writer’s rise from struggling mother to Nobel laureate. Plus, our 60-second guide to her life, and Malcolm Jones on her unerring art.
When Gish Jen delivered the Massey lectures in American history at Harvard in 2012—now published as Tiger Writing—the daughter of Chinese immigrants examined the East-West divide, not only in child-rearing but in fiction writing. Almost every novelist has had to contend with the question of “what is fiction,” and Jen picks her favorite lectures on writing, from Nabokov’s attention to detail, to a meditation on Edwidge Danticat’s immigrant experience, to Toni Morrison’s own Massey lecture.
