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Sour Heart
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Sour Heart
Sour Heart is a 2017 short story collection by Chinese American writer Jenny Zhang. Consisting of seven stories involving different Chinese families and their daughters, it was published by Lenny Books, Lena Dunham's Random House imprint.
The short story collection was critically acclaimed and named a best book of the year by several publications. It went on to win the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection.
In The Brooklyn Rail, Zhang stated that "there's a span of fourteen years between when I wrote the first story of this collection and when this collection came to exist in the final state that it’s in now." Many of her stories, about Chinese girls, were written during her time at Stanford University and subsequently the Iowa Writers' Workshop, with "The Evolution of My Brother" being written during her sophomore year at the former and then revised at the latter.
As she shared and workshopped her drafts, Zhang received comments about how her short stories about Chinese girls lacked universality, after which she felt challenged to continue writing from her own perspective while still having resonance broadly: "it was a little test to myself, wanting to show that every type of story is possible with these characters."
In Iowa, Zhang realized that all of her short stories "exist in the same fictional universe." However, she struggled to find a literary agent who would pick up her short stories, which caused her to try to write a novel instead. Her subsequent "failure to write a novel" then led her to revisit her short stories, rewrite them "in a fairly painstaking way, going word-by-word and changing, in many cases, almost every word," and then sell them as a book.
Sour Heart was the first book to be published by Dunham's Lenny imprint at Random House. Dunham had read Zhang's poetry collection, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, and the two connected over Twitter. Years later, Dunham had asked Zhang if she had any material that she would "want to show, say, an editor at Random House." At the time, Zhang had decided to try to sell Sour Heart.
Zhang was born in Shanghai but moved to New York City when she began elementary school. Of Chinese heritage, Zhang stated that she often felt "a profound sense of loss," largely due to her waning ability to speak Chinese, as well as the estrangement of being a minority in the United States: "Being a 1.5 generation immigrant is to exist between pages, even between boundaries. It feels like I’m missing a history—I don’t have a past in America or in China."
Regarding the centrality of the second-generation Chinese American girl's voice to the short story collection, Zhang stated that she wanted to have an organizing principle for her short story collection based around "this period of my life, where I was interested in exploring four or five big questions in different ways over and over again." Girlhood, in Zhang's conception, "is a story of desire; innocence; fall from innocence; being desired; being not desired; being desired by the wrong people; by dangerous people; by the right people; by excitingly dangerous people" and thus bore limitless potential to her as a place of storytelling. Of the multiplicity of daughters shown in Sour Heart, Zhang stated:
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Sour Heart
Sour Heart is a 2017 short story collection by Chinese American writer Jenny Zhang. Consisting of seven stories involving different Chinese families and their daughters, it was published by Lenny Books, Lena Dunham's Random House imprint.
The short story collection was critically acclaimed and named a best book of the year by several publications. It went on to win the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection.
In The Brooklyn Rail, Zhang stated that "there's a span of fourteen years between when I wrote the first story of this collection and when this collection came to exist in the final state that it’s in now." Many of her stories, about Chinese girls, were written during her time at Stanford University and subsequently the Iowa Writers' Workshop, with "The Evolution of My Brother" being written during her sophomore year at the former and then revised at the latter.
As she shared and workshopped her drafts, Zhang received comments about how her short stories about Chinese girls lacked universality, after which she felt challenged to continue writing from her own perspective while still having resonance broadly: "it was a little test to myself, wanting to show that every type of story is possible with these characters."
In Iowa, Zhang realized that all of her short stories "exist in the same fictional universe." However, she struggled to find a literary agent who would pick up her short stories, which caused her to try to write a novel instead. Her subsequent "failure to write a novel" then led her to revisit her short stories, rewrite them "in a fairly painstaking way, going word-by-word and changing, in many cases, almost every word," and then sell them as a book.
Sour Heart was the first book to be published by Dunham's Lenny imprint at Random House. Dunham had read Zhang's poetry collection, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, and the two connected over Twitter. Years later, Dunham had asked Zhang if she had any material that she would "want to show, say, an editor at Random House." At the time, Zhang had decided to try to sell Sour Heart.
Zhang was born in Shanghai but moved to New York City when she began elementary school. Of Chinese heritage, Zhang stated that she often felt "a profound sense of loss," largely due to her waning ability to speak Chinese, as well as the estrangement of being a minority in the United States: "Being a 1.5 generation immigrant is to exist between pages, even between boundaries. It feels like I’m missing a history—I don’t have a past in America or in China."
Regarding the centrality of the second-generation Chinese American girl's voice to the short story collection, Zhang stated that she wanted to have an organizing principle for her short story collection based around "this period of my life, where I was interested in exploring four or five big questions in different ways over and over again." Girlhood, in Zhang's conception, "is a story of desire; innocence; fall from innocence; being desired; being not desired; being desired by the wrong people; by dangerous people; by the right people; by excitingly dangerous people" and thus bore limitless potential to her as a place of storytelling. Of the multiplicity of daughters shown in Sour Heart, Zhang stated: