Sour Heart

Stories

By: Jenny Zhang

Narrated by: Greta Jung, Jenny Zhang, Kim Mai Guest, Nancy Wu, Emily Woo Zeller, Samantha Quan

A sly debut story collection that conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City—for readers of Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, and Junot Díaz

A fresh new voice emerges with the arrival of Sour Heart, establishing Jenny Zhang as a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God.

Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat—dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck—these seven stories showcase Zhang’s compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy’s Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again.

Advance praise for Sour Heart

“As I read, I quickly realized that this was something so new and powerful that it would come to shape the world—not just the literary world, but what we know about reality. Zhang’s version of honesty goes way past the familiar, with passages that burst into bold, startling, brilliance. Get ready.”—Miranda July

“Sour Heart blasts open the so-called immigrant narrative by showing us the claustrophobic, demented love of families and by giving us the deepest x-ray of American childhood I can recall. It’s dirty, hilarious, and utterly original.”—Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs

“No terrain is more fraught than the inner world of a girl fighting to define herself, and no writer is better suited to serve as our guide than Jenny Zhang. She is the coolest—wielding a discerning eye and a wicked wit that will cut you and make you cherish the wound she leaves behind. Sour Heart captures the magnificent mess that is the internal lives of young women seeking place—in their families, their communities, their bodies, and, most important, themselves.”—Janet Mock,author of Redefining Realness

“Jenny Zhang has an uncanny ability to articulate the most confusing, conflicting, elusive thoughts and feelings—the kinds that occur in under a millisecond but secretly rule our lives. It’s dazzling to witness until one observation or line of dialogue sends you over the edge into the depths of another person’s truth. I emerged from Sour Heart bleary-eyed and in love.”—Tavi Gevinson

Read by Greta Jung, Kim Mai Guest, Nancy Wu, Emily Woo Zeller, Samantha Quan, and the author!

Thoroughly enjoyed

I didn't realize these were interconnected stories when I started reading. I appreciate the world expansion. It begins with a small world where multitudes can coexist in a small space, sharing a group of mattresses on a room floor, moves through people find their own places and expanding world view, and ends with scattered people looking back at their origins. The interwoven stories of these characters are interesting and contain the same range of emotions people -- especially migrant people -- experience as they move through and try to find their own space(s) in the world.

I want to read/listen to Sour Heart again

Sour Heart is exquisitely crafted, compelling, and deep. The inter-linking narratives represent, in microcosm, the painful and beautiful history that is lost in any diaspora as families and generations move on. Thru the eyes and memories of young girls, the telling is honest and shines a clear light into the mists of various interpretations. A few scenes are excruciating, but worth reading because they give up-close glimpses of things we don't usually see.

The narration in the audible.com version is impeccable. I felt I was literally listening to the characters themselves. I will listen again.

Terrible book

A story about stupid clueless people, not interesting, just annoying.
Tried to feel compassion for the characters, didn’t like any of them.