An apprentice sushi chef and a mysterious blue-eyed woman share a bottle of wine inside a climate-controlled otter tank. The Great Wall of China grumbles as workers forego construction to watch an imperial game of baseball. A young woman tries to imagine a future unsullied by her familys history of untimely death.
First issued in 1991,Pangs of Love introduced David Wong Louies bold storytelling. The son of Chinese immigrants, he centered his stories around characters who are in conflict with their place in the world, disconnected from both American society and their own families. The depth of his portrayals renders their experiences of love, envy, loneliness, loss, and duty universalinformed by their heritage yet not confined by it. These twelve short stories and one essay swerve from the absurd to longing for love, understanding, or simply a morsel of food.
Pangs of Love and Other Writings makes Louies debut book available again, along with an additional short story and an extraordinary autobiographical essay, Eat, Memory, in which he reflects on life without food after throat cancer took away his ability to swallow. Pulitzer Prizewinner Viet Thanh Nguyen contributes a foreword elucidating Louies role in shaping contemporary Asian American literature, while an afterword by literary scholar King-Kok Cheung retraces the three phases of Louies career.
David Wong Louie (1954 - 2018) is the author of Pangs of Love and the novelThe Barbarians Are Coming. His work appeared inThe Best American Short Stories,100 Years of the Best American Short Stories, and The Best American Essays. He taught in the Department of English and the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA. Viet Thanh Nguyen is professor English, American stuides and ethnicity, and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. In 2017 he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. King-Kok Cheung is professor of English at UCLA.
