Dear Jenny We Are All Find

Poetry. Asian American Studies. "Jenny Zhang's poems broadcast themselves with a surrealist anxiety. 'Can't I be my own dream?' she asks. The answer is always yes and always no. With dizzying energy and intelligence, Zhang forages through familial, global, and even anatomical configurations vainly outlining an identity that manifests only to shift and move restlessly on. This book brings to mind a 21st century Whitman, only female, Chinese, and profoundly scatological." Elizabeth Robinson"

A New York Public Library Best Book of 2020 A Best Read of 2020 at Ms. Magazine "To read Jenny Zhang is to embrace primal states: pleasure, hunger, longing and rage." —TIME Radiant and tender, My Baby First Birthday is a collection that examines innocence, asking us who gets to be loved and who has to deplete themselves just to survive. Jenny Zhang writes about accepting pain, about the way we fetishize womanhood and motherhood, and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts. She questions the way we feminize and racialize nurturing, and live in service of other people’s dreams. How we idealize birth and being baby, how it’s only in our mothers’ wombs that we’re still considered innocent, blameless, and undamaged, because it’s only then that we don’t have to earn love. Her poems explore the obscenity of patriarchy, whiteness, and capitalism, the violence of rescue and heroism. The magic trick in My Baby First Birthday is that despite all these themes, the book never feels like some jeremiad. Zhang uses friendship as a lyric. She seeks tenderness, radiant beauty, and having love for your mistakes. Through all this, she writes about being alone—really alone, like why-was-I-ever-born alone—and trying, despite everything, to reach out and touch something—skin to skin, animal to animal.

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 and Helen Oyeyemi. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction • Finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • NPR • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Guardian • Esquire • New York • BuzzFeed 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. Praise for Sour Heart “[Jenny Zhang’s] coming-of-age tales are coarse and funny, sweet and sour, told in language that’s rough-hewn yet pulsating with energy.”—USA Today “One of the knockout fiction debuts of the year.”—New York “Compelling writing about what it means to be a teenager . . . It’s brilliant, it’s dark, but it’s also humorous and filled with love.”—Isaac Fitzgerald, Today “[A] combustible collection . . . in a class of its own.”—Booklist (starred review) “Gorgeous and grotesque . . . [a] tremendous debut.”—Slate

The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside

Selected by Jos Charles as the winner of the 2021 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Return Flight is a lush reckoning: with inheritance, with body, with trauma, with desire—and with the many tendons in between. When Return Flight asks “what name / do you crown yourself,” Huang answers with many. Textured with mountains—a folkloric goddess-prison, Yushan, mother, men, self—and peppered with shapeshifting creatures, spirits, and gods, the landscape of Jennifer Huang’s poems is at once mystical and fleshy, a “myth a mess of myself.” Sensuously, Huang depicts each of these not as things to claim but as topographies to behold and hold. Here, too, is another kind of mythology. Set to the music of “beating hearts / through objects passed down,” the poems travel through generations—among Taiwan, China, and America—cataloging familial wounds and beloved stories. A grandfather’s smile shining through rain, baby bok choy in a child’s bowl, a slap felt decades later—the result is a map of a present-day life, reflected through the past. Return Flight is a thrumming debut that teaches us how history harrows and heals, often with the same hand; how touch can mean “purple” and “blue” as much as it means intimacy; and how one might find a path toward joy not by leaving the past in the past, but by “[keeping a] hand on these memories, / to feel them to their ends.”

BONUS: This edition contains a Staying True discussion guide. In this candid and compelling memoir, the first lady of South Carolina reveals the private ordeal behind her very public betrayal—and offers inspiration for anyone struggling to keep faith during life’s most trying times. She’s been a successful investment banker, a mother of four, and the campaign manager for one of American politics’ rising stars—her husband, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, once widely hailed as a possible candidate for president in 2012. Yet to most Americans, Jenny Sanford is best known for the one role she refused to play—that of conventional political spouse standing silently by while her husband went before the media and confessed his infidelity. Instead, she stayed true—to herself, to her faith, and to her highest ideals of parenthood and public service. She chose to let Mark Sanford deal with the embarrassment and political fallout from his own actions while focusing her own efforts privately on raising their children to be men of character, even in the face of the lies their father has told. In Staying True, Jenny Sanford recalls her shock and anguish upon discovering that her husband was having an affair with a woman in Argentina, and the further pain when she learned—just a day ahead of most Americans—that he had not ended the affair when she believed he had. She reveals the source of her determination to be honest and forthright instead of the victim in the tabloid passion play that gripped the nation in June 2009. But her story neither begins nor ends with Mark Sanford’s astounding fall from grace. Writing with uncommon candor from a deep well of spiritual strength, Sanford shares personal stories and life lessons from before and after she stepped into the public realm. She recounts the many stresses—as well as the myriad joys—that she experienced on a daily basis while living in the governmental spotlight. (Just try keeping four young boys out of mischief in the governor’s mansion!) And she describes the many ways that the seductions of power can drive apart even the most committed couples. At every step along her journey, Jenny Sanford has made choices: She gave up her career, moved far from her home state of Illinois, even changed her religious practices. Every choice was a glad concession to harmonious married life and, in some cases, to the support of her husband’s political aspirations. But the one thing she never gave up was her sense of self, her inner moral compass. Her remarkable poise and decency make her a role model for men and women alike. Her story will empower anyone who has fought to maintain independence and integrity—within a marriage or elsewhere in life.

This book "renders the singular arc of a woman's life through letters Mary-Louise Parker composes to the men, real and hypothetical, who have informed the person she is today. Beginning with the grandfather she never knew, the letters range from a missive to the beloved priest from her childhood to remembrances of former lovers to an homage to a firefighter she encountered to a heartfelt communication with the uncle of the infant daughter she adopted"--

Grief brought high school senior Finley Sinclair to Ireland. Love will lead her home. Eighteen-year-old Finley Sinclair is witty, tough, talented, and driven. With an upcoming interview at the Manhattan music conservatory, she just needs to finish composing her audition piece. But her creativity disappeared with the death of her older brother, Will. She decides to take a break and study abroad, following Will’s travel journal to Ireland. Her brother felt closest to God there, and she hopes to find peace about his death. Meanwhile, Beckett Rush—teen heartthrob and Hollywood bad boy—is flying to Ireland to finish filming his latest vampire movie. On the flight, he bumps into Finley—the one girl who seems immune to his charm. Undeterred, Beckett convinces Finley to strike an unconventional bargain. As Finley deals with the loss of her brother, the pressures of school, and her impending audition, she wonders if an unlikely romance is blossoming between her and Beckett. Then she experiences something that radically changes her perspective on life. Has everything she’s been looking for been with her all along? Don’t miss Finding You—the movie based on There You’ll Find Me—released in 2021 Contemporary Young Adult romance Stand-alone novel Book length: 78,000 words Includes discussion questions for book clubs