We Two Alone

Jack Wang is the author of the award-winning story collection We Two Alone. He holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and a PhD in English from Florida State University, and he is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the David T. K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Originally from Vancouver, Canada, Wang is a professor of writing at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, where he lives with his wife and their two daughters.

"Wang has the distinct skill of evoking time and place, many eras, many places, and putting his characters, and the reader in them. For this, for his erudition, for his poetic prose, readers of short fiction should search out any short story he writes." — New York Journal of Books"The seven impeccable stories in Jack Wang's excellent debut collection feature a diasporic Chinese cast over decades and across continents....Wang writes with masterful assurance, eschewing labels, and creating exquisite gems of universal empathy." — Shelf Awareness, starred"Wang’s elegant debut delves into the heterogeneity of the Chinese diaspora in stories that take the reader to settings as disparate as 1920s Canada and Nazi-occupied Vienna....Wang’s prose is subtle and economical, well suited to his themes of disappointment, alienation, and departure. As the stories build on one another, they create a portrait full of both nuance and grace." — Publishers Weekly"These moving stories are both global and intimate as they span the continents where the Chinese diaspora has settled. With ingenuity and impeccable craft, Jack Wang gives us an utterly remarkable collection that zeroes in on the emotional texture of utterly unique lives.”  — Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer“This impressive and vibrant collection of stories takes the reader by the hand, leading us across the world and back in time. But they’re all unified by the gentle sensitivity of Jack Wang’s prose and his ability to inhabit characters who long for freedom, connection, and fulfillment. Deeply humane and beautifully wrought, these stories stay in the heart and the mind.” — Alix Ohlin, author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize finalists Dual Citizens and Inside“Jack Wang’s dazzling first collection of stories, We Two Alone, moves through decades and across continents with rare ease, telling not the story but some of the many stories of the Chinese diaspora in the last century. These stories are so elegantly shaped, so satisfying as individual stories, that their collective power sneaks up on you. There is a quiet and building intensity to the storytelling here, a commitment to chronicling — with deep compassion and a refusal of easy answers—the dignity of human experience against the broader indignities of history. I was moved, heartbroken, and thrilled.” — Emily Fridlund, author of the Booker Prize finalist History of Wolves“Jack Wang’s We Two Alone is not only a penetrating examination of the Chinese diaspora, it also brilliantly renders its subject in the most deeply resonant universal way, as the yearning for personal identity that drives us all in our shared humanity. This is a remarkable collection of stories, a remarkable work of art.” — Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain“A brilliant and ambitious vision of a hundred years of solitude: the Chinese diaspora navigated with courage, cleverness, and grace...As Frank O’Connor said, in the best short stories we find ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness.’ But these characters cross continents and oceans to free themselves from history and from their own ‘tiny flames,’ seeking peace, work, adventure, fame, and, above all, love. This is a delicately wrought and deeply moving book from an exceptional new voice.”  — Eleanor Henderson, author of The Twelve-Mile Straight and Ten Thousand Saints