Archive Date: September 21, 2017
Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Jenny Zhang reads from her fiction debut, Sour Heart: Stories. These stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God. Jenny Zhang is the author of the poetry collection Dear Jenny We are all Find, and the chapbook Hags. She lives in New York City.