Jenny Zhang

Sour Heart

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Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction
A Guardian, Nylon, Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, Vulture and Shelf Awareness Book of the Year 2017

'Relegate anything else you're reading — there is no other book to be seen with now' The Times


'Obscene, beautiful, moving' New Yorker
Centred on a community of immigrants precariously balanced on the edge of poverty in 1990s New York City, the stories that make up Sour Heart examine the ways that family and history can weigh us down, but also lift us up. From the young woman coming to terms with her grandmother's role in the Cultural Revolution, to the daughter struggling to understand where her family ends and she begins, these vibrant, raw and powerful stories introduce a bold and singular new voice.
This book is currently unavailable
335 printed pages
Publication year
2017
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Quotes

  • Dexter Calledohas quoted2 years ago
    Whenever I’m home for a few days, I start to feel this despair at being back in the place where I had spent so many afternoons dreaming of getting away, so many late nights fantasizing about who I would be once I was allowed to be someone apart from my family, once I was free to commit mistakes on my own. How strange it is to return to a place where my childish notions of freedom are everywhere to be found—in my journals and my doodles and the corners of the room where I sat fuming for hours, counting down the days until I could leave this place and start my real life. But now that trying to become someone on my own is no longer something to dream about but just my ever-present reality, now that my former conviction that I had been burdened with the responsibility of taking care of this household has been revealed to be untrue, that all along, my responsibilities had been negligible, illusory even, that all along, our parents had been the ones watching over us—me and my brother—and now that I am on my own, the days of resenting my parents for loving me too much and my brother for needing me too intensely have been replaced with the days of feeling bewildered by the prospect of finding some other identity besides “daughter” or “sister.” It turns out that this, too, is terrifying, all of it is terrifying. Being someone is terrifying. I long to come home, but now, I will always come home to my family as a visitor, and that weighs on me, reverts me back into the teenager I was, but instead of insisting that I want everyone to leave me alone, what I want now is for someone to beg me to stay. Me again.
  • Dexter Calledohas quoted2 years ago
    That’s life, it just is. Not everyone can have everything they want.
  • Dexter Calledohas quoted2 years ago
    I was fully cognizant and participating in my own creation and suddenly it was clear to me why we don’t remember what it was like to be born—because it would give us too much insight into what it will be like to die. To be present for your own birth was suicide. To know the true wonder of suddenly existing was to know the true fear of suddenly ceasing to exist. They had to occur together and there was no prayer for what I knew in my flaky soul—that there was no way to escape the fear. It would always be there, amplifying joy and stealing from it. Still, it was tempting to sink into it, to roll around in its outer rings where occasionally the fear converted to a kind of happiness that turned an entire afternoon into an image that would stay forever, loom forever, return forever.
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