Lan samantha chang biography sample
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Renaissance of the Weird: Experimental Fiction as the New American Normal
So you pick up a New Yorker short story, hoping to find something fresh. Here’s one that seems to have gotten a lot of attention, “The Ghost Birds,” by Karen Russell. In no time you find yourself spellbound, swept up in a world where no one would want to live, a near-future biosphere so toxic it’s killed off all the birds. Gloomy stuff indeed, and yet you turn pages or swipe screens fascinated, compelled in large part by the sheer strangeness.
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Russell will kick off a section with an arresting line like “To be a kid requires difficult detective work,” thereby opening an alternative point of view for which the only correlative might be the children’s barracks at Auschwitz. She’ll interrupt the narrative with lists of the bird species lost, or with flashbacks so compelling, they could be whole novels in thumbnail: “The fires spread to every continent. The air
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Lan Samantha Chang
The Family Chao
- By: Lan Samantha Chang
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
The residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have dined on the Fine Chao Restaurant’s delicious Americanized Chinese food for 35 years, happy to ignore any unsavory whispers about the family owners....
- 5 out of 5 stars
An American Family Saga of Love and Loyalty
- bygd Mary Tsao on 04-14-22
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The Gentle Defiance of Chinelo Okparanta
Chinelo Okparanta almost did not attend John Freeman’s talk. It was fall of 2011, and she had been working on her fiction at Dey House, the historic Italianate building that houses the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She was sitting at the back in the reading room, by chance, when the then Granta editor’s event began, and when he said he would collect stories from workshop participants who wished to give him, she printed three and gave him. He boarded a flight back to New York.
“Somewhere over Pennsylvania, my hands started to sweat,” Freeman would say years later about reading her work on that flight. “Here was a real talent. Someone who knew how often the press of love had to find small spaces. Her stories were patient and wise, as if they were written by a woman in her 80s who had condensed all her experience into 12 key narratives.”
Okparanta was only 30 at the time, but Freeman’s appraisal was of the storytelling instincts of a woman who, t