Home Remedies

Stories

By: Xuan Juliana Wang

Narrated by: Catherine Ho, Tim Chiou, Feodor Chin, full cast, Lawrence Kao, Nancy Wu, David Shih, Cory Censoprano, Joel de la Fuente, Annie Q, Jennifer Lim, Elaine Kao

Length: 6 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

"An urgent and necessary literary voice." (Alexander Chee, Electric Literature)

"Tough, luminous stories." (The New York Times Book Review)

"Spectacular." (Vogue)

• A finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award
• Shortlisted for the Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
• Winner of the California Book Awards Gold Medal in First Fiction
• Winner of the John Zacharis First Book Award
• Longlisted for the Story Prize
• Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Library Journal

Xuan Juliana Wang's remarkable debut introduces us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth. From fuerdai (second-generation rich kids) to a glass-swallowing qigong grandmaster, her dazzling, formally inventive stories upend the immigrant narrative to reveal a new experience of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are, in a world as vast and varied as their ambitions.

In stories of love, family, and friendship, here are the voices, faces, and stories of a new generation never before captured in fiction. What sets them apart is Juliana Wang’s surprising imagination, able to capture the innermost thoughts of her characters with astonishing empathy, as well as the contradictions of the modern immigrant experience in a way that feels almost universal. Home Remedies is, in the words of Alexander Chee, "the arrival of an urgent and necessary literary voice we’ve been needing, waiting for maybe, without knowing."

"A radiant new talent." (Lauren Groff)

"These dazzling stories interrogate the fractures, collisions and glorious new alloys of what it means to be a Chinese millennial." (Adam Johnson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Orphan Master’s Son)

"Home Remedies doesn’t read like a first collection; like Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, the twelve stories here announce the arrival of an exciting, electric new voice." (Financial Times)

"Stylistically ambitious in a way rarely seen in prose fiction.... Writing like this will never stop enlightening us. [Wang’s] voice comes to us from the edge of a new world." (Los Angeles Review of Books)

©2019 Xuan Juliana Wang (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"A must-read literary force with...debut collection of stories that brings to life characters from the Chinese diaspora.... Each one underscores the imaginative and compelling mind of this fresh new voice." (The Daily Beast, "The Best Summer Beach Reads of 2019")

"Remarkable...Wang captures the strivings and uncertainty of Chinese youth establishing themselves in America and beyond.... [A] deft, striking debut." (New York Observer, "Spring 2019 Must-Read Books")

"Tough, luminous stories about destiny, fealty, belonging and heartbreak... Wang unpacks unwieldy relationships with a light touch, slicing cleanly through the intricacies to render them instantly familiar.... Wang’s writing is sensory, cinematic and fluid." (The New York Times Book Review)

Jubilant journeys

After listening to all 12 stories in one go, 'Home Remedies' took me on a journey through some beautiful places and deep emotions. I sat on a roofless tram in Hong Kong for hours, gazing at the neon signs, taking in the book and giggling to myself.

As an immigrant myself, Julianna's imageries triggered pockets of childhood memories with eerie precision.

I imagined myself as one of the many characters - like Echo, a girl borrowing clothes from an apartment of someone who just died. Or Lucy, a youngest of three, who patted her newly-singled mom on the head, trying to cheer her out of her misery with no avail.

I fully recommend ‘Home Remedies’, and hope you find a few hours of wandering into your own mind as fun as I have.