Jenny Zhang has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 7 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 12 ratings. The most-rated is Sour Heart.
Sour Heart
Summary
A sly debut story collection that conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City - for listeners of Zadie Smith, Helen Oyeyemi, and Junot Díaz. A fresh new voice emerges with the arrival of Sour Heart, establishing Jenny Zhang as a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God. Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat - Dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck - these seven stories showcase Zhang's compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy's Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family and to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again.
©2017 Jenny Zhang (P)2017 Random House Audio
March Sisters
Summary
For the 150th anniversary of the publication of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Kate Bolick, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Jane Smiley explore their strong, lifelong personal engagement with Alcott's novel - what it has meant to them and why it still matters. Each takes as her subject one of the four March sisters, reflecting on their stories and what they have to teach us about life. Kate Bolick finds parallels in oldest sister Meg's brush with glamour at the Moffats' ball and her own complicated relationship with clothes. Jenny Zhang confesses to liking Jo least among the sisters when she first read the novel as a girl, uncomfortable in finding so much of herself in a character she feared was too unfeminine. Carmen Maria Machado writes about the real-life tragedy of Lizzie Alcott, the inspiration for third sister Beth, and the horror story that can result from not being the author of your own life's narrative. And Jane Smiley rehabilitates the reputation of youngest sister Amy, whom she sees as a modern feminist role model for those of us who are, well, not like the fiery Jo. These four voices come together to form a deep, funny, far-ranging meditation on the power of great literature to shape our lives.
©2019 Kate Bolick (“Meg’s Frock Shock”); copyright 2019 by Jenny Zhang (“Does Genius Burn, Jo?”); copyright 2019 by Carmen Maria Machado (“A Dear and Nothing Else”); copyright 2019 by Jane Smiley (“I Am Your ‘Prudent Amy’”) (P)2019 Tantor