A Good Fall: Stories
(Libby/OverDrive eBook, Kindle)

*Starred Review* In The Bridegroom (2000), his last collection of short stories, Ha Jin, a National Book Award winner, captures the paradoxes of life under China's Communist regime. In his new stories, sharply etched works remarkable for the contrast between their directness of expression and complexity of feelings, he creates a mirror-image set of tales about a Chinese immigrant community in Flushing, New York. Ha Jin's ear and eye for Chinese American life are acute, as is his sense of how one life can encompass a full spectrum of irony, desperation, and magic. The advent of e-mail enables a sister in China to blackmail her sister in America. A struggling composer develops a remarkable rapport with his absent lover's parakeet. Marriages come under duress, one due to the almost surreal insensitivity of a visiting mother, the other to the husband's suspicions about his wife and the strange truth they reveal. A classic story about grandparents from the old country appalled by their Americanized grandchildren is balanced by the startling title story, in which a young kung fu master and monk achieves an unforeseen form of enlightenment. The quest for freedom yields surprising and resonant complications in Ha Jin's sorrowful, funny, and bittersweet stories.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist

From National Book Award-winner Jin (Waiting) comes a new collection that focuses on Flushing, one of New York City's largest Chinese immigrant communities. With startling clarity, Jin explores the challenges, loneliness and uplift associated with discovering one's place in America. Many different generational perspectives are laid out, from the young male sweatshop-worker narrator of "The House Behind a Weeping Cherry," who lives in the same rooming-house as three prostitutes, to the grandfather of "Children as Enemies," who disapproves of his grandchildren's desires to Americanize their names. Anxiety and distrust plague many of Jin's characters, and while the desire for love and companionship is strong, economic concerns tend to outweigh all others. In "Temporary Love," Jin explores the inevitable complications of becoming a "wartime couple" or "men and women who, unable to bring their spouses to America, cohabit... to comfort each other and also to reduce living expenses." With piercing insight, Jin paints a vast, fascinating portrait of a neighborhood and a people in flux. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

With an enviable literary reputation built on award-winning titles set in China, poet/novelist/short story writer Jin recently debuted his first U.S.-based novel, A Free Life, about the Americanization of a Chinese immigrant family. While the 12 stories in his latest release continue to explore familiar immigrant themes-assimilation, isolation, generation gaps-Jin again captures the smallest details to create uniquely resonating portraits of everyday people: a lonely composer befriends his girlfriend's parakeet in "A Composer and His Parakeet," a man suspects his wife of infidelity in "The Beauty," an elderly couple are shunned by their American grandchildren in "Children as Enemies," and a garment worker falls for a prostitute in "The House Behind a Weeping Cherry." VERDICT Beyond his characters' ethnic backgrounds, Jin's writing clearly has mass appeal, most notably exemplified by National Book Award winner Waiting. This new work will be welcomed by any reader and is an excellent companion piece to The Bridegroom, a collection whose characters are the Chinese counterparts of characters featured here.-Terry Hong, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, Washington, DC (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

First collection of short fiction in nine years from expatriate novelist Ha Jin (A Free Life, 2007, etc.). All set in Flushing, N.Y., all concerned with the Chinese immigrant's experience in America, these 12 stories are unified in geography and theme, uneven in richness and depth. The opening piece, "The Bane of the Internet," is one of the slightest, suggesting in four pages that the speed and amount of communication offered by e-mail aren't necessary benefits for a Chinese immigrant with relatives back home. Many other stories also resemble fables or parables, with generic titles and plot twists reminiscent of O. Henry. "Beauty" shows that quality to be not what it appears, and not merely skin deep. "Choice" concerns a series of (you guessed it) choices, as a graduate student opts for the humanities and deprives himself of the support his parents would have offered for a more professionally focused education. He finds a tutoring job to pay the bills and is torn between his teenaged pupil and her mother, an attractive young widow, but the climactic choice turns out not to be his. "Shame" invites the reader to find autobiography within its narrative, as a student's changing relationship with his former professor inspires a first novel in English. Generational tension bristles through "Children as Enemies" and "In the Crossfire," as elders prove resistant to the assimilation that younger Chinese-Americans are more likely to embrace. The title story is the most powerful, as an immigrant monk on the verge of suicide finds despair leading to redemption. "You can always change," he learns. "This is America, where it's never too late to turn over a new page." Rich imagery"drizzle swayed in the wind like endless tangled threads," "the streetlights were swimming in my eyes"displays the author's poetic gifts, but some of these tales belabor the obvious. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.