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“There’s this kind of irresolvable trap that occurs when you’re too young to have any power but old enough to know that you want some.” Jenny Zhang reads from her essay “Blond Girls in Cheongsams,” which is included in the collection The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America (Little, Brown, 2019) edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman.
At the Waterstones bookstore in London, Jenny Zhang talks about several books that have significantly influenced her writing: Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (Random House, 1969), George Saunders’s Pastoralia (Riverhead Books, 2000), and Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (Penguin Books, 1993). Zhang’s first short story collection, Sour Heart (Lenny, 2017), won the 2018 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction.
