“Hunger is a masterwork of enormous power. This is a collection I return to for its beauty, love, and grace. I carry Lan Samantha Chang’s vivid characters in my heart.” —Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires

“One day, decades ago, I picked up Hunger, and I found I could not put it down. In a way, I’ve never stopped reading the book: I teach the stories to my students; I study the way the sentences fix themselves into crystalline prose; I invite in all the ghosts. Lan Samantha Chang has not only influenced my own development as a writer, she’s one of the most influential writers in American letters full stop. Hunger is a masterpiece, a necessary haunting.” —Justin Torres, author of We the Animals and Blackouts: A Novel

“A work of gorgeous, enduring prose.” —Washington Post

“Elegant.… A delicately calculated balance sheet of the losses and gains of immigrants whose lives are stretched between two radically different cultures.” —Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review

“Spare and haunting tales that ask ordinary questions about that extraordinary emotion: love.” —Chicago Tribune

“Chang concentrates on depicting—with considerable insight and originality—the fault lines of assimilation in American society. Her tales nicely capture the sometimes blunt, often painful, and only rarely hopeful negotiations conducted between parents and children, and between immigrants and natives, above this shifting ground… The debut of a writer possessing a distinctive, fresh imagination and voice.” —Kirkus

“Impeccable. . . . Delicately specific tales of Chinese immigrant life . . . capturing the universal struggles of the human heart. . . . So luminous is this collection, the result is something like a pearl.” ―San Diego Union-Tribune

“That Chang is able to evoke so nuanced a reaction is a testament to her unrelenting dramatic vision, her depth and subtlety of insight and her beautiful, merciless prose.” —Boston Book Review

“Poignant.... Chang is able to sketch quickly complex personalities caught in a ghetto-like emotional condition. [Her] descriptions recall Henry Roth's or Bernard Malamud's immigrant families at the turn of the century.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

“In clear, often shining prose, she paints the world of Asian American immigrants....Hunger places Chang firmly among the group of novelists whose writing about lost homelands has received high acclaim: Oscar Hijeulos, Cristina Garcia, Amy Tan, Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, and Junot Diaz.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Chang's clear, crisp prose makes the everyday world of Chinese immigrants depicted in her short stories and novella one of great intensity. With each phrase of object drawing an even greater importance, the work's beauty and value transcend its urban and ethnic setting.” —Harvard Book Review

“At once dispassionate and intimate, this collection—a novella and five short stories--is a remarkable debut....Comparisons to Amy Tan are perhaps unavoidable, but they are insufficient to describe this darker, more piercing young writer.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This remarkable first book has a deeply tragic sensibility, but it whispers its tragedy, thereby heightening it. Hunger evinces, in many ways, the quintessential voice of the immigrant, obscured by longings, distance and nostalgia, muted by language itself, yet resolutely insistent. These stories may be soft-spoken, but they will not be silenced.” —Portland Oregonian

“[An] impressively wise and lyrical debut....Chang's beguiling stories are about being Chinese, being America, being both and neither; but more than that, they are about the pain of being loved and loving in return being in physical and psychic exile.” —Hungry Mind Review