SOUR HEART

Jenny Zhang's new story collection is an elegant and unconventional take on the immigrant story. Zhang's writing strips away the layers between reader and experience; her gaze is unflinching, and she never cuts away when things become uncomfortable or grotesque. The effect is something like watching a wound scar in reverse. It seems to say: This is the site of trauma. I might heal, but I'll never be the same.

[W]ows... With Sour Heart, Zhang's obsessions and powers - her wit, achingly adolescent characters, pop-poetic vulgarity - have coalesced. [B]oth fully realized and nervy, a fearless entrance into a literary world that is Zhang's for the taking.

Zhang is a powerful fiction writer who offers an intimate look at girlhood.

Jenny Zhang has an uncanny ability to articulate the most confusing, conflicting, elusive thoughts and feelings -- the kinds that occur in under a millisecond but secretly rule our lives. It's dazzling to witness until one observation or line of dialogue sends you over the edge into the depths of another person's truth. I emerged fromSour Heartbleary-eyed and in love.

[A] moving exploration of immigration, race, family and coming-of-age.

Humor and pain coincide... While the characters may worry, they are unflinching in their storytelling, and Zhang has written a book that is original, raw, and fearless.

Sour Heart often derives its strength from Zhang's ability to locate humor, pathos, and magic in the kind of mundane, everyday scenarios other writers might skip over entirely...

Jenny Zhang's astounding short-story collection, "Sour Heart," combines ingenious and tightly controlled technical artistry with an unfettered emotional directness that frequently moves, within single sentences, from overwhelming beauty to abject pain. "Sour Heart" is a feminist bildungsroman - the narrators act upon their world just as much as the world acts upon them - and it depicts, from start to finish, a collective coming of age.

[T]hese linked stories illuminate the complexities and contradictions of first-generation life in America. Zhang has a gift for sharp, impactful endings, and a poet’s ear for memorable detail.

Zhang's stories sprawl, but in a way that play to her strengths: distinct voice, an ear for poetic flourishes, a precedent of place over plot. And in these stories, which are at once funny and gross and vibrant, we find Zhang's central characters - all women - reckoning with confused identity.

A gripping collection of stories that takes readers into the heart of New York City and the beautifully messy lives of the young girls that inhabit it. From unrequited love to the promise of dreams, Sour Heart captures the spirit of all five boroughs through eyes of the girls who grew up in them.

Sour Heart... a collection of seven short stories from Brooklyn poet Jenny Zhang, who, we can safely say, is "a voice" of a generation, and an original one who commands attention. Her coming-of-age tales are coarse and funny, sweet and sour, told in language that's rough-hewn yet pulsating with energy. Her girls, like so many, are caught in between: different cultures, warring parents. Add assimilation to the bucket of typical teenage woes, and good luck with that.

SOUR HEART was named one of Best Adult Books of 2017

Jenny Zhang's coming-of-age stories will leave a mark on your heart...

[A] debut short story collection by poet Jenny Zhang called Sour Heart, publishes August 1 and has been heralded as one of the biggest, buzziest books of 2017. Zhang's collection of seven stories artfully imagines the intertwining lives of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City. Across cultural and economic divides, each girl finds her way in a new land that is all but forgiving.

[W]itty, seductive, and a much-needed fresh take on the Chinese immigrant experience.

Jenny Zhang's raw Sour Heart is an unforgettable debut collection. In her illustration of Chinese immigration in the '90s, Zhang is often humorous though refrains from lighter tones. The humor in each story is earned in the same way the intensity and depth arethrough the strength of each story's character arc. It is the funny moments of misunderstandings, growth, and relationships that make the girls so real and immensely complex. Sour Heart is more than a collection of stories worth telling; they're the sort that rarely get told.

Sour Heart gracefully traces the multifaceted intersections of several Chinese-American girls growing up in '90s-era New York City. Reading Zhang's stories in sequence is like looking through a prism at other people's lives: candid, kaleidoscopic, and often illuminating. The characters in this collection come up against socioeconomic limitations; they seek to understand the contours of their parents' and grandparents' experiences abroad before they were born; they reckon with the power of their changing bodies. Yet their first-generation immigrant status and gender do not wholly define them. Throughout Sour Heart, Zhang does not shy away from portraying girls who are not a hundred percent lovable a hundred percent of the time.

Zhang portrays the courage, humor, and complex emotions of these young women struggling to come to terms with who they are, their families, their bodies, and growing up in poverty, in seven stories that feel true to life.

Zhang, author of the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (2012), lets these daughters of scholars and artists, who in the 1990s take America up on its many slow-to-be-delivered promises, be gross and unkind, and swear exquisitely. Zhang's insightful, combustible collection is in a class of its own.

Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart is a revelation. It’s the inaugural publication from the Lenny Letter imprint and also the most personally impactful collection of stories I’ve read by someone who looks, sounds, and thinks like me. Zhang and her characters are all young women from immigrant families trying to navigate life in America and I heard my voice in every sentence, felt my burdens in every paragraph, and saw my experiences in every story. In short: I related SO HARD.

[A] forceful performance and one of the knockout fiction debuts of the year.

There's restlessness in these stories. Its characters reach for something that often remains maddeningly beyond their grasp the fabled American promise of a better life dangled before immigrant parents and their children. "Sour Heart" at its best shimmers with vibrancy and compassion.

In her debut collection Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang has crafted stories that are, in equal measures, tender and vulgar, insightful yet thoroughly laced with the immature voice of childhood. Much of Sour Heart also centers around the family as a tightly bonded but imperfect unit. For the narrators in this delightful debut, the family is a place where a young girl can be cherished for being her sour self."

The topic couldn't be more timely as immigration debates continue to flare; with unblinking candor, Zhang illuminates the struggles to belong, to settle, to be welcomed home.

Sour Heart' is joltingly fresh and necessary. She's a standout choice for first Lenny author, an imprint dedicated to publishing complex female voices.

UK: Bloomsbury ; Brazil: Companhia das Letras ; France: Editions Philippe Picquier

[D]eliciously straightforward... At times darkly comic, but never lacking in empathy or affection, Zhang's writing explores issues of class, language, identity, and emerging sexuality. Zhang's incisive rendering of lonely women-in-progress is an intimate, affecting, and altogether unputdownable meditation on the messy business of girlhood.

In her Book Sour Heart, Jenny Zhang arrives as a Chinese-American voice we haven't heard yet... the specificity and intense focus of her writing lends itself... to the stories in Sour Heart - to the different forms of fear and violence within its pages; the joys and thrills and cruelties traded among young girls; the way emotions and memories are transmitted across generations; how language - and its deficits - structure experience.

No terrain is more fraught than the inner world of a girl fighting to define herself, and no writer is better suited to serve as our guide than Jenny Zhang. She isthecoolest – wielding a discerning eye andwicked wit that will cut you and make you cherish the wound she leaves behind.Sour Heartcaptures the magnificent mess that is the internal lives of young women seeking place–in their families, their communities, their bodies and, most important, themselves.

[R]esolute in its ability to unsettle and even uproot—lighting your every nerve on fire, leaving your every synapse flashing—before gracefully relocating you with a newfound sense of firmness in yourself, a new understanding of who “yourself” actually is. Zhang’s debut story collection, Sour Heart, comprises seven narratives that can fairly be categorized as coming-of-age tales, but which transcend any notion you might have of what that even means, courtesy of Zhang’s singular voice. [E]xquisitely beautiful…especially relevant right now. It’s an insightful and striking work, one that aptly demonstrates Zhang’s prodigious gifts.

Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart, published by Lena Dunham's new imprint, Lenny, is a sly, brilliant debut made up of stories narrated by daughters of Chinese immigrants navigating '90s New York.

SOUR HEART was recently named winner of THE 2018 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Read more...

Compelling, compelling writing about what it means to be a teenager. It's brilliant, it's dark, but it's also humorous and filled with love... you'll feel compelled as a human.

Jenny Zhang's debut short-story collection, Sour Heart, is bursting at the seams with honesty, reality, and a tremendous amount of heart as she traverses the world between being a kid and being an adult.