Tiger Writing Tiger Writing

Tiger Writing

Art, Culture, and Interdependence

    • 5.0 • 1 Rating
    • $9.99
    • $9.99

Publisher Description

For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsiders’ Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.

Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies to her father’s striking account of his childhood in China, this accessible book not only illuminates Jen’s own development and celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self—each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world. The novel, Jen writes, is fundamentally a Western form that values originality, authenticity, and the truth of individual experience. By contrast, Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent. In its progress from a moving evocation of one writer’s life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have shaped our experience for millennia, Tiger Writing radically shifts the way we understand ourselves and our art-making.

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2013
March 25
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
201
Pages
PUBLISHER
Gish Jen
SELLER
Lillian C Jen
SIZE
5.1
MB

Customer Reviews

Fathom365 ,

Indispensable to me too.

What I love most about Tiger Writing are the journeys it takes you on -- across the most familiar of American and European literature and into the unfamiliar of the East, from poetry to architecture to the Mona Lisa and still yet into brain research and culture studies, and finally 900 years into Jen’s ancestry, from New York back to Shanghai and Lake Tai. All in just 200 pages!

Don’t be fooled by the subtitle that this is a challenging or academic book. Serious yes, thoughtfully provocative certainly, but fun to read – a surprising ‘page turner’ given the subject matter, as Jen has surprises for you around each corner. The photos are wonderful and I only wish there were more…

I’m Irish-American, and the Irish, being a somewhat “clannish” people, exhibit some of the qualities described in Jen’s Asian examples of interdependence – more ties to the East than just our mutual animosity to the British I guess. But its clearly not just us Irish-Americans that find something in Jen’s writing: I was struck by Junot Diaz’ use of the word “indispensible,” first about Jen’s already-classic novel Typical American (in a NYTimes interview), and now on the Tiger Writing book jacket, describing this “profound meditation” as “penetrating, inspired, and yes, indispensable.” So there is something much more universal about Tiger Writing – something for every American, regardless of stripe (or ancestry).

I consider myself an educated reader of broad interests, and to me, Tiger Writing ends up on my indispensible list. And, given its small size and beautiful cover, it will be an indispensible part of my Christmas giving as well.

More Books Like This

How to Read Now How to Read Now
2022
White Flights White Flights
2019
Essays One Essays One
2019
PEN America 1: Classics PEN America 1: Classics
2000
Dancing at the Edge of the World Dancing at the Edge of the World
2017
Languages of Truth Languages of Truth
2021

More Books by Gish Jen

The Resisters The Resisters
2020
David Copperfield David Copperfield
1962
Who's Irish? Who's Irish?
1999
The Girl at the Baggage Claim The Girl at the Baggage Claim
2017
World and Town World and Town
2010
Typical American Typical American
2014