Library of America #355

"Since exploding onto the literary stage with The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston has, in book after book, made words sing and soar, search and scorch. But she is more than a writer's writer. She is writer as pioneer, writer as visionary, writer as bringer of peace. A champion, not so much of irony and wit as of love and compassion, she has often worked as much through aura as words--paradoxically cutting, as she does, a most singular and challenging swath. She is a gift to all, a national treasure and an American original." -- Gish Jen

"Maxine Hong Kingston made a stunning entrance on the American literary scene with the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning The Woman Warrior (1976), her "memoirs of a childhood among ghosts." An account of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California, the book is at once an audacious feat of imaginative storytelling and a path breaking work of feminist autobiography, drawing on the myths, folktales, and family stories her mother brought over from China to make sense of a transformed life in the United States. "The Woman Warrior changed American culture," writes Hua Hsu in The New Yorker. "For those who understood where Kingston was coming from, it was encouragement that they could tell stories, too. For those who didn't, The Woman Warrior became the definitive telling of the Asian immigrant experience, at a time when there weren't many to choose from." --

National Book Award, Distinguished Contribution to American Letters for author, 2008

Woman Warrior - China Men - Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book - Hawaiʻi One Summer - Essays, Reviews & Poems 1977-87