Who's Irish?: Stories [Paperback]

The stories in Who's Irish? show us the children of immigrants looking wonderingly at their parents' efforts to assimilate, while the older generation asks how so much selfless hard work on their part can have yielded them offspring who'd sooner drop out of life than succeed at it. 

With dazzling wit and compassion, Gish Jen—author of the acclaimed novels Typical American and Mona in the Promised Land—looks at ambition and compromise at century's end and finds that much of the action is as familiar—and as strange—as the things we know to be most deeply true about ourselves.Who's Irish

Birthmates

The Water Faucet Vision

Duncan in China

Just Wait

Chin

In the American Society

House, House, House Jen's gift is for comedy that resonates, and sadnesses that arise with perfect timing from absurdities.  Her subject matter is so appealing, it almost obscures the power and suppleness of her language.  —The New York Times Book Review

Gish Jen's fiction is always engaging, always necessary.  —Newsday

“Nobody’s having more fun with American diversity than Gish Jen. . . . One of the greatest charms of her fiction is her position as a bemused chronicler . . . of the hugely comic potential in human nature.”—The Boston Globe

Sparkling—a gently satiric look at the American Dream and its fallout on those who pursue it.  —The New York Times

Tender and funny . . . vibrant and courageous.  —San Francisco Chronicle
Gish Jen is the author of four novels, a book of stories, and two books of nonfiction, The Girl at the Baggage Claim and Tiger Writing. Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for fiction and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award froml³@