THE SORROWS OF OTHERS

Ada Zhang's debut collection, THE SORROWS OF OTHERS (A Public Space, May 2023), is an incisive, immersive, deeply moving exploration of family, identity, alienation, and belonging, as told through the lives of a diverse cross-section of the Chinese diaspora in America and of people living in China in the years since the Cultural Revolution.

In New York City, an art student moves in with a grandmother from Xi'an, and boundaries are put into question. A newlywed couple moves to Arizona and is forced to adapt to unfamiliar customs. A woman grapples with what it means to be a caregiver when her dying husband returns from Beijing years after abandoning her. And during a rainy summer in Texas, a visitor exposes the unspoken but unburiable history that binds two families together. Nearly all of Zhang's characters, both young and old, are confronted in one way or another with the sense of being an outsider: whether as immigrants, as revolutionaries, or as strangers within their own homes or marriages. The stories are particularly deft in their portrayal of the complex dynamics between people forced by blood, marriage, or social convention to share domestic space with one another. Ada Zhang is a National Book Foundation 2023 5 Under 35 Honoree and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her short stories have appeared in A Public Space, McSweeney's, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She is currently the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. She is at work on a novel.