Gish Jen is a novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. Her books include Who’s Irish? (1999), Typical American (1991), Mona in the Promised Land (1997), The Love Wife (2004), and Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Independent Self (2013). She also contributes to the New Yorker, The Atlantic, the New York Times, Ploughshares, and the New Republic. This essay first appeared in A New Literary History of America (2009), edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors.
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