World Books podcast: Gish Jen
Gish Jen
The title of Chinese-American writer Gish Jen’s latest novel, World And Town, suggests the story’s international resonance. Set in a small town in New England, the book examines the growing pressures — global and local, religious and technological — on the rural American experience.
In her earlier novels, such as Typical American and The Love Wife, Jen explores the thorny intricacies of the country’s culture clash. But World and Town stands as her most ambitious and dramatically powerful attempt to look at issues of identity and perception though an imaginative lens that this time around memorably jumps from the domestic to the cosmic.
World Books editor Bill Marx spoke to Jen about what her novel says about the impact of the world on the American small town in the new millennium.
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