Deceit and Other Possibilities, Vanessa Hua
Deceit and Other Possibilities, Vanessa Hua
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Deceit and Other Possibilities
Stories

Author: Vanessa Hua

Narrator: Cindy Kay, David Shih

Unabridged: 8 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/07/2020

Categories: Fiction, Short Stories


Synopsis

In her powerful collection, first published in 2016 and now featuring new stories, Vanessa Hua gives voice to immigrant families navigating a new America. Tied to their ancestral and adopted homelands in ways unimaginable in generations past, these memorable characters straddle both worlds but belong to none.

From a Hong Kong movie idol fleeing a sex scandal to an obedient daughter turned Stanford pretender, from a Chinatown elder summoned to his village to a Korean American pastor with a secret agenda, the characters in the collection illustrate the conflict between self and society, tradition and change. In "What We Have Is What We Need," winner of the Atlantic's Student Writing Contest, a boy from Mexico reunites with his parents in San Francisco. When he suspects his mother has found love elsewhere, he fights to keep his family together.

With insight and wit, Hua writes about what wounds us and what we must survive. This all-new edition of Deceit and Other Possibilities marks the emergence of a remarkable writer.

About Vanessa Hua

Vanessa Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of A River of Stars. She has received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the San Francisco Foundation's James D. Phelan Award, and a Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Washington Post.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bkwmlee on March 29, 2020

Two years ago, I read Vanessa Hua’s debut novel A River of Stars, which presented a realistic take on the Chinese immigrant experience against the backdrop of the “birth tourism” phenomenon in the United States. I enjoyed that book quite a bit, not just for the story and the characters, but also......more

Goodreads review by luce (cry bebè's back from hiatus) on August 28, 2021

| | blog | tumblr | ko-fi | | Hua’s stories explore, however superficially, the experiences of Chinese and Chinese-Americans in the United States: the generational and cultural differences between immigrant parents and their American-born children, the struggle to assimilate into a different countr......more

Goodreads review by Naz on December 15, 2016

Closer to 4.5 stars. One of the best short story collections I've read this year. As the title may suggest, the common thread in all of these stories is deception. Let me tell you, this makes for fascinating storytelling and tension. Some of the characters deceive themselves while others outwardly and......more

Goodreads review by Ethel on September 21, 2016

There’s an intense energy to the stories in Vanessa Hua’s DECEIT AND OTHER POSSIBILITIES (love the dissonance of the title) that mirrors the fraught, sometimes frenzied lives of its struggling Asian, immigrant characters. The persistent depiction of excess in the settings (including San Francisco, my......more

Goodreads review by Kaitlin on June 20, 2017

I don't often read short stories (am more of a novel and essay junkie), but I was deeply drawn to the characters and narratives in this collection. Hua is a talented writer whose insights into immigrant and identity politics build stories that resonate well beyond the page -- I'm now counting down t......more