Perhaps not since the literary community "discovered" Jewish-American writers in the 1950s have we experienced such a concentrated ethnic wave. Gish Jen's Typical American is an equally big hit.Īt the same time, Japanese-American writers are flourishing. Two publishers fought for the right to publish David Wong Louie's Pang of Love, a collection of short stories. The Literary Guild purchased the rights to the book Random House did an audio version with M. Gus Lee's China Boy, for example, had an initial print run of 75,000, huge for a first-time author. Two years later, at least four other Chinese-American writers had brisk-selling books. The success of Tan's book increased publishers' willingness to gamble on first books by Asian-American writers. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan's first novel, sold an astonishing 275,000 hard-cover copies upon its 1989 publication. Even so, ten more years had to pass until another Asian-American writer achieved fame and fortune. It was not until the 1976 publication of Maxine Hong Kingston's mystical memoir of her San Francisco childhood, The Woman Warrior, that Asian-American writers broke into mainstream American literature.
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