Sour Heart

Relegate anything else you’re reading – there is no other book to be seen with now * The Times *
Deliciously subverts conventions of "immigrant literature" * Pankaj Mishra, Guardian Books of the Year *
Obscene, beautiful, moving … Jenny Zhang’s astounding short story collection, Sour Heart, combines ingenious and tightly controlled technical artistry with an unfettered emotional directness that frequently moves, within single sentences, from overwhelming beauty to abject pain * New Yorker *
The writing is vibrant, the smells of the city vivid. Zhang’s is an exciting voice and a welcome one * Observer *
Zhang gives life to a chorus of voices rich with reinvention, a narrative genealogy of what it is to be, to speak and to write across many forms of expression at once * Guardian *
Swerves from off-kilter humour to quiet devastation * Sunday Telegraph *
Zhang is a new name to me, but what a discovery! These interlinked stories follow the lives of young Chinese immigrants struggling to make sense of life in modern America. They are intense, unsettling, occasionally filthy and often wildly funny -- Jonathan Coe * The Week *
A hilarious and highly original debut collection … With a voice that is relatable yet wonderfully original, Zhang explores themes of sexual awakening, identity, poverty and integrating as an immigrant in the western world … A collection where it is difficult to pick a stand-out story because each leaves such a mark * Irish Times *
A refreshingly honest portrayal of some of the more universal realities of girlhood … That’s what makes Zhang’s work so remarkable: her unique ability to tell universal truths about what it means to belong, while illuminating realities we simply do not hear often enough about * Independent *
A new voice for a generation – a hugely original debut short story collection … Zhang’s writing is gritty, confronting and continually surprising – the bleakest moments are shot through with love and humour … the raw edge of Zhang’s very necessary new voice had me gripped * Stylist *
Raw, and often darkly comic … the tales revel in the intimate details of domesticity, resonant of A M Homes or Helen Ellis * Red *
A tapestry of beautifully evocative stories * Grazia *
Who isn’t anticipating this book? Jenny Zhang is one of the most exciting and thoroughly original new voices in American fiction, and Sour Heart is worth every bit of hype … Hilarious and devastating, tender, and mischievous. Zhang’s beautiful, direct and sometimes scatological poetry (and her bang-on essays) had already won many of us over, but this book will catapult her to another league * LitHub *
The narrators of these tales pull you close and hold you hostage with their singular takes on the world … You’d be hard pressed to find a more intimate, raw and funny collection this summer * AnOther Magazine *
A buzz book * Cosmopolitan *
As I read, I quickly realized this was something so new and powerful that it would come to shape the world, not just the literary world, but what we know about reality. Zhang’s version of honesty goes way past the familiar, with passages that burst into a bold, startling brilliance. Get ready * Miranda July *
Her writing is resolute in its ability to unsettle and even uproot – lighting your every nerve on fire, leaving your every synapse flashing * Nylon *
Sour Heart blasts open the so-called ‘immigrant narrative’ by showing us the claustrophobic, cracked lives and demented love of families and by giving us the deepest x-ray of American childhood I can recall. Dirty, hilarious, and utterly original * Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs *
Jenny Zhang has an uncanny ability to articulate the most confusing, conflicting, elusive thoughts and feelings – the kinds that occur in under a millisecond but secretly rule our lives. It's dazzling to witness until one observation or line of dialogue sends you over the edge into the depths of another person's truth. I emerged from Sour Heart bleary-eyed and in love * Tavi Gevinson *