Gish Jen Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Gish Jen is an American published author.

She was born on August 12, 1955 in Long Island, New York. She grew up there, speaking more Yiddish than Chinese. Since then, she has been featured in a PBS American Masters program on the American novel. She has also received a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Fullbright fellowship, and a Radcliffe Institute fellowship.

In 1999, she was given a Lannan Literary Prize. In 2003, the American Academy of Arts and Letters presented her with the Harold and Mildred Strauss Living Award. In 2009 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has also been published in the New Yorker and the Atlantic in addition to other magazines and publications, periodicals, textbooks and anthologies.

Gish Jen’s writing has been featured four times in The Best American Short Stories. She was also selected to be featured in The Best American Short Stories of The Century. She has also been nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. She belongs to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a visiting professor at Harvard.

She resides with her husband and children in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Resisters is a 2020 book by Gish Jen. This is a book that is about a future America and also works in baseball into it in a creative novel that is audacious and just flat out fun.

This story is set in AutoAmerica at a time in the not so distant future. While the land may be located half under water, there are bigger fish to fry. The Internet is the government’s new face and has become Aunt Nettie, a combination of A.I., surveillance tech, and maxims.

The people are now divided, but no one is happy. The “Netted” are angel fair and they still get to have jobs, occupying the high ground. The “Surplus” who have copper toned skin live in the swampland and on the water if they are less lucky.

A Surplus couple have a Blasian girl who has a golden arm. Her father’s a former professor, and her mother is a lawyer. At the age of two years old, she was throwing her stuffed animals from the crib. At ten years old she can hit any target with a baseball, and in her teens, she is playing on a league for Surplus underground.

AutoAmerica comes into the Olympics once more, hoping to beat ChinRussia. Gwen gets interest and is soon at New U, falling for her coach and even considering crossing over as her mother is taking on the AutoAmerican Way with lawsuits that might end up causing them a lot of trouble.

This is an interesting story of America that could be possible and the story mostly of a family who is trying to hold onto their humanity in the middle of a situation that could threaten every value that they have, even their existence. Will they make it through? Read this book to find out!

Bad Bad Girl is a novel by Gish Jen. It is a RuPaul’s Book Club Pick and was named one of the 15 best books of the year by the L.A. Times. This is a funny and at times sad autobiographical novel that follows along with a complicated mother and daughter relationship. Grab a copy and check out the book that the Boston Globe called a ‘transcendent work of art’.

Gish’s mother was born to a wealthy family in Shanghai in 1924. In Loo Shu-hsin’s family, the expectation was that girls would manage themselves and restrain their emotions. Her nursemaid was more loving to her than her mother, and yet is withheld from her as she is reprimanded and criticized for not knowing how to talk and called a bad bad girl.

She is sent to a Catholic school by her father and gets the English name of Agnes but also a great education. She excels, which he is very happy about. But then he also feels bad, saying that she could accomplish a lot if she were a boy. Agnes feels bad but turns to books to feel better. In 1947, she tells everyone how she wants to get a PhD in America. As the Communist revolution is coming, she gets on a boat and leaves and will never come back.

On her own in New York, she starts dating engineering student Jen Chao-Pe. They try to ignore the status of their families back home, which is getting worse. They move on with their lives and establish a life of their own in America. They get married, have a house in the suburbs, and have a son. By the time that Gish is born, things have changed.

The news from China is bad, their marriage is not doing well, and Agnes is always telling her how bad she is saying ‘bad bad girl’. This is the type of book that comes from experience, and as such is one that Gish Jen alone could have written. It crosses over cultures, generations, continents, and times. Junot Diaz calls it the ‘multi-generational mother-daughter epic of our new century’. Incisive, wise, interesting and compassionate, check out the book that the Los Angeles Times calls ‘heart-piercingly personal’ and get a copy of Bad Bad Girl to go on this journey yourself.