Books with author Maxine Hong Kingston

“A classic, for a reason” – Celeste Ng via TwitterIn her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form—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. 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.

“A classic, for a reason” – Celeste Ng via TwitterIn her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form—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. 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.

Sometimes referred to as a book without a genre, 'The Woman Warrior' has been described as a memoir, an autobiography, a novel, a manifesto; yet none of these labels really apply. Kingston herself says that to write autobiography is to stand at the borderline between memory and invention. hroughout the five chapters of The Woman Warrior, Kingston blends autobiography with old Chinese folktales. What results is a complex portrayal of the 20th century experiences of Chinese-Americans living in the U.S in the shadow of the Chinese Revolution. The Woman Warrior has been reported by the Modern Language Association as the most commonly taught text in modern university education. It has been used in disciplines as far reaching as American literature, anthropology, Asian studies, composition, education, psychology, sociology, and women's studies. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of Time Magazine's top nonfiction books of the 1970s.