An apprentice sushi chef and a mysterious
blue-eyed woman share a bottle of wine inside a climate-controlled otter tank.
The Great Wall of China grumbles as workers forego construction to watch an
imperial game of baseball. A young woman tries to imagine a future unsullied by
her family's history of untimely death. First issued in 1991, Pangs of Love
introduced David Wong Louie's bold storytelling. The son of Chinese immigrants,
he centered his stories around characters who are in conflict with their place in
the world, disconnected from both American society and their own families. The
depth of his portrayals renders their experiences of love, envy, loneliness,
loss, and duty universal-informed by their heritage yet not confined by it.
These twelve short stories and one essay swerve from the absurd to longing for
love, understanding, or simply a morsel of food. Pangs of Love and Other
Writings makes Louie's debut book available again, along with an additional
short story and an extraordinary autobiographical essay, "Eat,
Memory," in which he reflects on life without food after throat cancer
took away his ability to swallow. Pulitzer Prize-winner Viet Thanh Nguyen
contributes a foreword elucidating Louie's role in shaping contemporary Asian
American literature, while an afterword by literary scholar King-Kok Cheung
retraces the three phases of Louie's career.
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