Acclaimed Author Gish Jen to Read By Marci Janas
	Gish Jen PHOTOGRAPH © JILL KREMENTZ		NOVEMBER 24, 1999--Gish Jen, author of two novels and the recent collection of stories Who's Irish? will read from her works at 4:45 P.M. December 2 in King 306. The Creative Writing Program, the Shansi Memorial Association, the Shansi Student Committee, the Office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the history department are sponsoring the free, public event. Jen's novels, Typical American (1991) and Mona in the Promised Land (1996), have been widely reviewed and highly praised. Jayne Anne Phillips says of Typical American: "This immensely intelligent, thunderously funny, truly heartbreaking novel is perhaps the best story of contemporary immigrant experience ever to grace our literature." Publishers Weekly writes: "The Chinese-American author is a known quantity by now, though her sometimes uproarious but just as compassionate tales of culture clash always manage to find some new and surprising angles from which to ambush the reader." Martha Collins, codirector of Oberlin's Creative Writing Program, says Jen's "novels and stories describe the lives and interactions of Chinese Americans and other Americans with keen intelligence, wit, and warmth." Jen's work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and more than 50 anthologies, including Best American Short Stories and The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Jen has degrees from Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. (She even admits to a stint at Stanford Business School.) She grew up in Scarsdale, New York, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children.
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