Best Selling Books by Maxine Hong Kingston

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American. • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER “A classic, for a reason.” —Celeste Ng, bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts, via Twitter As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother’s “talk stories.” The fierce and wily women warriors of her mother’s tales clash jarringly with the harsh reality of female oppression out of which they come. Kingston’s sense of self emerges in the mystifying gaps in these stories, which she learns to fill with stories of her own. A warrior of words, she forges fractured myths and memories into an incandescent whole, achieving a new understanding of her family’s past and her own present.

Essays on the island and its history and traditions from the National Book Award–winning author of The Woman Warrior. In these eleven thought-provoking pieces, acclaimed writer and feminist Maxine Hong Kingston tells stories of Hawai''i filled with both personal experience and wider perspective. From a recipient of the National Medal of Arts and numerous other honors, the essays in this collection provide readers with a generous sampling of Kingston''s exquisite angle of vision, her balanced and clear-sighted prose, and her stunning insight that awakens one to a wealth of knowledge.

The author chronicles the lives of three generations of Chinese men in America, woven from memory, myth and fact. Here''s a storyteller''s tale of what they endured in a strange new land.

A long time ago in China, there existed three Books of Peace that proved so threatening to the reigning powers that they had them burned. Many years later Maxine Hong Kingston wrote a Fourth Book of Peace, but it too was burned--in the catastrophic Berkeley-Oakland Hills fire of 1991, a fire that coincided with the death of her father. Now in this visionary and redemptive work, Kingston completes her interrupted labor, weaving fiction and memoir into a luminous meditation on war and peace, devastation and renewal.

"I have almost finished my longbook," Maxine Hong Kingston declares. "Let my life as Poet begin...I won''t be a workhorse anymore; I''ll be a skylark." To Be the Poet is Kingston''s manifesto, the avowal and declaration of a writer who has devoted a good part of her sixty years to writing prose, and who, over the course of this spirited and inspiring book, works out what the rest of her life will be, in poetry. Taking readers along with her, this celebrated writer gathers advice from her gifted contemporaries and from sages, critics, and writers whom she takes as ancestors. She consults her past, her conscience, her time--and puts together a volume at once irreverent and deeply serious, playful and practical, partaking of poetry throughout as it pursues the meaning, the possibility, and the power of the life of the poet. A manual on inviting poetry, on conjuring the elusive muse, To Be the Poet is also a harvest of poems, from charms recollected out of childhood to bursts of eloquence, wonder, and waggish wit along the way to discovering what it is to be a poet.

In a fascinating collection of interviews, renowned author Maxine Hong Kingston talks about her life, her writing, and the role of Asian-Americans in our history. As her books always hover along the hazy line between fiction and memoir, she clarifies the differences and exults in the difficulties of distinguishing between the remembered and the re-created.

In her singular voice—both humble and brave, touching and humorous—Maxine Hong Kingston gives us a poignant and beautiful memoir-in-verse that captures the wisdom that comes with age. As she reflects on her sixty-five years, she circles from present to past and back, from lunch with a writer friend to the funeral of a Vietnam veteran, from her long marriage to her arrest at a peace march in Washington. On her journeys as writer, peace activist, teacher, and mother, she revisits her most beloved characters—Wittman Ah-Sing, the Tripmaster Monkey, and Fa Mook Lan, the Woman Warrior—and presents us with a beautiful meditation on China then and now. The result is a marvelous account of an American life of great purpose and joy, and the tonic wisdom of a writer we have come to cherish.

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Driven by his dream to write and stage an epic stage production of interwoven Chinese novelsWittman Ah Sing, a Chinese-American hippie in the late ’60s.

The largest and most comprehensive edition of our foremost Asian American writer: three classic books and additional writings, many rare, that together offer a vivid and searching portrait of immigrant experience and American dreams. Maxine Hong Kingston made a stunning entrance on the American literary scene with The Woman Warrior (1976), her “memoirs of a childhood among ghosts." Not only an account of growing up poor and Chinese American in the San Joaquin Valley, it was also an audacious feat of imaginative transformation and pathbreaking work of feminist autobiography, drawing on ancient myths and the family stories her mother brought over from China to make sense of a transformed life in America. A companion to The Woman Warrior, which she called her “mother-book,” Kingston’s “father-book” China Men (1980) spreads out across a large geographical and historical canvas to envision the lives of her male relatives who immigrated to America. Taken together, The Woman Warrior and China Men offer a profound, kaleidoscopic, genre-defying narrative of the American experience. Kingston''s third book, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), is the wildly inventive story of Wittman Ah Sing, a Berkeley graduate student whose experience of the San Francisco Beat scene transforms his understanding of his own Chinese heritage. Rounding out the volume are a series of essays from 1978 reflecting on her life in Hawaii, later collected as Hawai‘i One Summer, personal musings whose subjects range from the contentions of a conference of Asian American writers to home-buying, surfing, and the work of the Beat poet Lew Welch. Also included are hard-to-find essays about the creative process and Kingston’s exasperated, insightful account of how most of the reviewers of The Woman Warrior fell prey to lazy stereotypes about the “exotic” and “inscrutable” East.

" Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace" is a harvest of creative, redemptive storytelling-nonfiction, fiction, and poetry-spanning five wars and written by those most profoundly affected by it. This poignant collection, compiled from Kingston''s healing workshops, contains the distilled wisdom of survivors of five wars, including combatants, war widows, spouses, children, conscientious objectors, and veterans of domestic abuse. " Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace" includes accounts from people that grew up in military families, served as medics in the thick of war, or came home to homelessness. All struggle with trauma - PTSD, substance abuse, and other consequences of war and violence. Through their extraordinary writings, readers witness worlds coming apart and being put back together again through liberating insight, community, and the deep transformation that is possible only by coming to grips with the past. For more than 15 years, National Book Award-winning author Maxine Hong Kingston has led writing-and-meditation workshops for veterans and their families. The contributors to this volume are part of this community of writers working together to heal the trauma of war through art. Maxine Hong Kingston''s books-" The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, The Fifth Book of Peace," and others-have won critical praise and national awards. President Bill Clinton presented her with a National Humanities Medal in 1997.

UN CLÁSICO MODERNO GANADOR DEL NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD MÁS DE UN MILLÓN DE EJEMPLARES VENDIDOS UNA ESTIMULANTE MEZCLA DE AUTOBIOGRAFÍA Y MITOLOGÍA «Vertiginoso, elemental, un poema convertido en espada». THE NEW YORK TIMES «Un clásico, y con razón». CELESTE NG Cuando era niña, Kingston habitó dos mundos muy distintos: la California a la que emigraron sus padres y la China de las historias de su madre. Las feroces y astutas guerreras que poblaban los cuentos de su madre chocaban frontalmente con la dura realidad que le había tocado vivir a las mujeres de su familia. El sentido de identidad de Kingston emergió en las grietas de estas historias, vacíos que aprendió a llenar con sus propias fabulaciones. Guerrera de las palabras, la autora forja en estas páginas mitos y recuerdos, fundiéndolo todo para hallar una comprensión nueva de su linaje y de su propio presente. Un libro que combina la autobiografía con el folclore chino para crear un rico tapiz de historias que exploran temas universales como la identidad, el feminismo o la herencia cultural. «Intensa, feroz e inquietante. Una historia salvajemente aterradora y literalmente maravillosa». THE WASHINGTON POST «Un triunfo. Sorprendentemente lograda» . TIME

Maxine Hong Kingston wächst in zwei scheinbar unvereinbaren Welten auf: im individualistischen Kalifornien der 1940er-Jahre, wohin ihre Eltern migrierten, und in dem in den Geschichten ihrer Mutter, Tapfere Orchidee, heraufbeschworenen China – einem Land voller Geisterglauben und Schrecken, Tradition und Zusammenhalt, das im harschen Widerspruch zur misogynen Wirklichkeit von starken, findigen Frauen bevölkert wird. Mit der Aufgabe betraut, jene unsichtbare Welt der Geister und Wunder in Einklang zu bringen mit den Bedingungen der neuen Heimat, begibt sich Kingston schließlich auf die Suche nach ihrem eigenen Platz in der Welt. Sie findet ihn in den rätselhaften Lücken, die ihr die Erzählungen der Mutter offenbaren. Kingstons so zorniges wie bezauberndes, vielschichtiges wie selbstbewusstes Die Schwertkämpferin ist ein bahnbrechendes Werk über Emigration und Identität, angesiedelt zwischen Fiktion und Erinnerung, Folklore und Familiengeschichte, ein ständiges Hin und Her zwischen dem profanen Alltag im Wäschereigeschäft der Familie und epischen, surrealen Traumlandschaften, das große emanzipative Kraft entfaltet.