Del i serien Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories

Häftad, Engelska, 2023

479 kr

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This collection of linked stories follows four generations of the Songs, a Korean American family, beginning in 1924 just prior to the Immigration Act and extending to near the end of the century. Linked stories, or stories that form a story cycle, are a common book-length form seen in Asian American literature that accommodates multiple perspectives across generations and locations. Through this story cycle, patterns emerge as cultural identity and individuality, often in tension with one another, shape choices and outcomes. With these stories, Carol Roh Spaulding charts shifting definitions of “Americanness” across time through the arc of a family narrative. She also explores desire and belonging as articulated, in turns, by the mother, father, granddaughter, great-grandson, and even a ghost child who died after a tragic accident. But these linked stories center on the life experiences of Gracie Song. They follow her from girlhood to young motherhood, through her children’s teenage years, and finally to her elderly solitude, when to her great astonishment she finds romance with a younger man and reconciliation with an estranged daughter—both unexpected gifts of later life.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2023-09-15
Mått140 x 216 x 23 mm
Vikt252 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieFlannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
Antal sidor224
FörlagUniversity of Georgia Press
ISBN9780820365268

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Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories, Carol Roh Spaulding’s uniquely linked collection of stories and one novella, follows three generations of the Song family, beginning with the family’s emigration from Korea to California shortly before the 1924 Immigration Act. Decade by decade, with shifting perspectives, Waiting for Mr. Kim lays out what it means to be a daughter and what it means to be a mother, what it means to be an immigrant, what it means to be an Asian-American woman in this country. The reader first meets Grace—whose perspective threads through many of the stories—via her older sister, a ghost narrator who died tragically and whose death haunts these stories. In the novella that ends the collection, Grace is a grandmother caring for the son of her estranged daughter and is also an older woman embracing desire and love. Roh Spaulding’s prose is gorgeous and lyrical, at other times quiet and restrained, always beautifully precise. Waiting for Mr. Kim is the collection that we have been waiting for, whether we knew it or not.