We Two Alone: Stories
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Description
Praised as “utterly remarkable” and “deeply resonant” by Pulitzer Prize-winning authors Viet Thanh Nguyen and Robert Olen Butler, a bold and brilliant debut collection, in the vein of The Refugees, which dramatizes the Chinese diaspora across the globe over the past hundred years.
Set on five continents and spanning decades, We Two Alone traces the arc and evolution of the Chinese immigrant experience. A young laundry boy risks his life, pretending to be a girl to play organized hockey in Canada in the 1920s. A Canadian couple is caught when Shanghai succumbs to violence during the Second Sino-Japanese War. A family sttempts to buy a home in South Africa in the early years of apartheid. An actor in New York struggles to keep his career alive while yearning to reconcile with his estranged wife.
From the vulnerable and disenfranchised to the educated and privileged, the characters in this extraordinary collection embody the diversity of the Chinese diaspora past and present. In these deeply affecting stories, Jack Wang subverts expectations as he captures the hope, pain, and sacrifices of the millions who journey into the unknown to create better lives, and explores the shifting boundaries of morality, the intimacies and failings of love, and the choices circumstances force us to make.
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Published Reviews
Publisher's Weekly Review
Wang's elegant debut delves into the heterogeneity of the Chinese diaspora in stories that take the reader to settings as disparate as 1920s Canada and Nazi-occupied Vienna. Wang is equally convincing with the voice of the insecure Oxford undergraduate whose parents run a Chinese takeaway in "Belsize Park," as he is with a washed-up Chinese American hockey player and deadbeat dad living in modern-day Florida in "Allhallows." In "The Nature of Things," a pregnant wife from Vancouver's Chinatown is living in Shanghai on the eve of the 1937 Japanese attack. The title story is the longest, and the standout; its protagonist is Leonard Xiao, a Chinese-American actor in his late 40s whose career never quite got off the ground. Having so long wanted to prove his Harvard physicist father wrong about the viability of his career choice, Leonard poignantly grapples with the reality that this may never happen. Occasionally the stories feel as if they end prematurely and avoid narrative conflict, but Wang's prose is subtle and economical, well suited to his themes of disappointment, alienation, and departure. As the stories build on one another, they create a portrait full of both nuance and grace. Agent: Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists. (June)
PW Annex Reviews
Wang's elegant debut delves into the heterogeneity of the Chinese diaspora in stories that take the reader to settings as disparate as 1920s Canada and Nazi-occupied Vienna. Wang is equally convincing with the voice of the insecure Oxford undergraduate whose parents run a Chinese takeaway in "Belsize Park," as he is with a washed-up Chinese American hockey player and deadbeat dad living in modern-day Florida in "Allhallows." In "The Nature of Things," a pregnant wife from Vancouver's Chinatown is living in Shanghai on the eve of the 1937 Japanese attack. The title story is the longest, and the standout; its protagonist is Leonard Xiao, a Chinese-American actor in his late 40s whose career never quite got off the ground. Having so long wanted to prove his Harvard physicist father wrong about the viability of his career choice, Leonard poignantly grapples with the reality that this may never happen. Occasionally the stories feel as if they end prematurely and avoid narrative conflict, but Wang's prose is subtle and economical, well suited to his themes of disappointment, alienation, and departure. As the stories build on one another, they create a portrait full of both nuance and grace. Agent: Jackie Kaiser, Westwood Creative Artists. (June)
Copyright 2021 Publishers Weekly Annex.Reviews from GoodReads
Citations
Wang, J. (2021). We Two Alone: Stories . HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)Wang, Jack. 2021. We Two Alone: Stories. HarperCollins.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities (Notes and Bibliography) Citation, 17th Edition (style guide)Wang, Jack. We Two Alone: Stories HarperCollins, 2021.
Harvard Citation (style guide)Wang, J. (2021). We two alone: stories. HarperCollins.
MLA Citation, 9th Edition (style guide)Wang, Jack. We Two Alone: Stories HarperCollins, 2021.
Copy Details
Collection | Owned | Available | Number of Holds |
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Libby | 1 | 1 | 0 |