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The SALON Interview: Amy Tan More Amy Tan links: 
Academy of Achievement Interview with Amy Tan with audio and video Sonoma Independent | Amy Tan Interview with Gretchen Giles Find and Share Opinions on Amy Tan Amy Tan Argues against Ethnic Literary Label Beijing stops Amy Tan speech |
AMY TAN
Amy Tan's reading Scheduled for Monday October 1 has been cancelled. Amy Tan hit the United States best-seller lists with her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989. The book grew out of a short story, "Rules of the Game," which Tan had written for a writing workshop in 1985. The American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants, Tan built a career as a professional business writer and did not turn to fiction till her mid-thirties. The Joy Luck Club was the longest-running title in its New York Times Best-Seller List category for 1989, and also a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her subsequent novels, The Kitchen God's Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses, have also gone straight to the best-seller lists, not only in the United States but also in Canada, Australia, Spain, Germany and many other countries. Her fourth novel for adults, The Bonesetter's Daughter, appears in 2001. In the mean time Tan has also published two books for children: The Moon Lady and The Chinese Siamese Cat. To date, the center of Amy Tan's fiction has been the Chinese immigrant experience: a contrast of old-country customs and beliefs to the ways of the new world, and an exploration of the differences that occur between the various generations of the complex Chinese families she portrays, as the process of their assimilation into U.S. society moves onward. However, she has resisted being labeled as an "ethnic writer" and has resisted the idea that she is particularly or peculiarly a spokesperson for the Chinese-American community. "I write for myself," she says in an essay for the The Threepenny Review. "I write because I enjoy stories and make-believe, the power of words and the lovely peculiarities of language. I write because there is a lot I don't understand about life and death, myself and the world and the great in-between…. I write to find the questions that I should ask." |
 Books by Amy Tan Excerpt from The Joy Luck Club USA Today Review of The Hundred Secret Senses Review of The Kitchen God's Wife for children:
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goucher college creative writing program |
