Maxine Hong Kingston

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.

"Since exploding onto the literary stage with The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston has, in book after book, made words sing and soar, search and scorch. But she is more than a writer's writer. She is writer as pioneer, writer as visionary, writer as bringer of peace. A champion, not so much of irony and wit as of love and compassion, she has often worked as much through aura as words--paradoxically cutting, as she does, a most singular and challenging...

"It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found dead near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their death as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's dictatorship. It doesn't have to. Everybody knows of Las...

"What is it about the relationship between fathers and daughters that provokes so much exquisite tenderness, satisfying communion, longing for more, idealization from both ends, followed often if not inevitably by disappointment, hurt, and the need to understand and forgive, or to finger the guilt of not understanding and loving enough?" writes Phillip Lopate, in his introduction to this collection of 24 personal essays by women writers writing about...