Home Remedies

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

The twelve stories in Xuan Juliana Wang's funny and wise debut collection capture the unheard voices of a new generation of Chinese youth, a generation for whom the Cultural Revolution is a distant memory, WeChat is king and life glitters with the possibility of love, travel, technology, and, above all, new beginnings.

At the Beijing Olympics, a pair of synchronized divers stand poised at the edge of success and sexual self-discovery. A Chinese-American girl in Paris finds her life changed when she begins wearing a dead person's clothes. And on a winter evening, a father creates an algorithm to troubleshoot the problem of raising a daughter across an ever-widening gulf of cultures and generations.

From second-generation rich kids and livestream stars to a glass-swallowing qigong grandmaster, these stories upend the well-worn path of the immigrant experience to reveal a new face of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are and who they will one day become, in a world as vast and various as their ambitions.

Reviews

Striking, soulful and ablaze with promise. * Observer *
Remarkable...Wang captures the strivings and uncertainty of Chinese youth establishing themselves in America and beyond...[A] deft, striking debut. * New York Observer, Spring 2019 Must-Read Books *
The sixteen stories in Home Remedies are so artful, funny, generous and empathetic that they'll linger in readers for weeks after you finish the book. Xuan Juliana Wang is a radiant new talent. -- Lauren Groff * author of Fates and Furies *

In just 12 stories, Wang manages to whip up the portrait of a generation...Proving herself to be an
incredible new talent and giving voice to Chinese millennials, this is a short story collection you need to read this summer.

* Stylist *
An exciting, electric new voice... Sublime. * Financial Times *

The dozen stories in this dazzling and unclassifiable collection interrogate the fractures, collisions and glorious new alloys of what it means to be a Chinese Millennial. Xuan Juliana Wang has the dark soul of an old poet's inkwell, the deep knowing of an ancient remedy, and linguistic incandescence of a megacity skyline. Trust these stories to show you the way.

* Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master's Son *
With style, verve and grace, Wang brings a new perspective to stories about family and community. Both modern and innovative, her stories surprise and challenge in wonderful, wonderful ways. * Weike Wang, author of Chemistry *
Tasty little bits of perfection. One of the great debuts of the year. * Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story *
The American dream goes global in Xuan Juliana Wang's spectacular debut.... Moving from lower Manhattan to mainland China, the dozen tales in the collection are peopled by immigrants in limbo and Asian millennials riding high on WeChat and rock'n'roll.... Sublimely captivating. * Vogue *
Endearing characters with bizarre fixations fill Wang's superb debut collection, a perfect book to dip into this summer.... Wang's striking characters are fresh, clever, and shouldn't be missed. * Publishers Weekly *
Bright * Elle *
Studded with poetic lines... Home Remedies is full of soulful, Beijing-based coming-of-age stories. * Skinny *
Clever and strange, these stories move from America to China and back again, with themes of identity, privilege and race. * Independent *
Elements of the surreal and the elegiac mixed in with the comedy and social satire. A memorable collection. * Dan Brotzel, The Scotsman *
A striking demonstration of Wang's versatile storytelling gifts, presenting a range of characters, perspectives, and formal choices that prove she has the tools to write a story in whatever way it needs to be written. Home Remedies is filled with characters facing boundaries to be crossed: cultural, familial, economic, political. The magic of these stories radiates from the friction created as characters enter new worlds and try, imperfectly, to make a home for themselves. * The Rumpus *

Xuan Juliana Wang's remarkable debut introduces us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth... her
dazzling, formally inventive stories upend the immigrant narrative to reveal a new experience of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are, in a world as vast and varied as their ambitions... In stories of love, family, and friendship, here are the voices, faces and stories of a new generationnever before captured between the pages in fiction. What sets them apart is Juliana Wang's surprising imagination, able to capture the innermost thoughts of her characters with astonishing empathy.

* Book Riot *

Author Bio

Xuan Juliana Wang was born in Heilongjiang, China, and moved to Los Angeles when she was seven years old. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Best American Nonrequired Reading and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She lives in California.