New ebooks From Canadian Indies

9781487008826_cover Enlarge Cover View Excerpt
0 of 5
0 ratings
rated!
rated!
list price: $34.99
edition:Audiobook
also available: Paperback eBook Audiobook
category: Fiction
published: Feb 2021
ISBN:9781487008826
publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
imprint: Anansi Audio

We Two Alone

by Jack Wang, read by Samantha Quan

tagged: short stories (single author), literary, asian american
Description

Winner, 2020 Danuta Gleed Award

Longlisted for Canada Reads 2022

A masterful collection of stories that dramatizes the Chinese diaspora across the globe over the past hundred years, We Two Alone is Jack Wang’s astonishing debut work of fiction.

Set on five continents and spanning nearly a century, We Two Alone traces the long arc and evolution of the Chinese immigrant experience. A young laundry boy risks his life to play organized hockey in Canada in the 1920s. A Canadian couple gets caught in the outbreak of violence in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The consul general of China attempts to save lives following Kristallnacht in Vienna. A family aspires to buy a home in South Africa, during the rise of apartheid. An actor in New York struggles to keep his career alive while yearning to reconcile with his estranged wife.

From the vulnerable and disenfranchised to the educated and elite, the characters in this extraordinary collection embody the diversity of the diaspora at key moments in history and in contemporary times. Jack Wang has crafted deeply affecting stories that not only subvert expectations but contend with mortality and delicately draw out the intimacies and failings of love.

About the Authors

Jack Wang

JACK WANG is the author of the story collection We Two Alone, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and longlisted for Canada Reads. His writing has appeared in the Fiddlehead, Brick, PRISM international, the Malahat Review, the New Quarterly, and Joyland, and has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and longlisted for the Journey Prize. He held the David T.K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, and has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts. Originally from Vancouver, he lives in Ithaca, New York, with his wife, novelist Angelina Mirabella, and their two daughters.


Samantha Quan

SAMANTHA QUAN is a graduate of the Graduate Acting Program at New York University. She has performed on stage in New York and regionally, including at The Ensemble Studio Theater and the Globe Theaters. Samantha presently resides in Los Angeles, where she works in film and television.

Awards
  • Winner, Danuta Gleed Literary Award
  • Long-listed, CBC Canada Reads
Editorial Reviews

Jack Wang is a welcome new voice in Canadian letters … [We Two Alone] is serious, engaging, well crafted, thought-provoking. Wang clearly has something to say, and this accomplished collection not only says it but also promises a great deal more to come.

— Ormsby Review

Jack Wang’s extraordinary debut book of stories, We Two Alone, weaves a path across the world, following the Chinese diaspora over nearly a hundred years. It’s the kind of collection that comes along only once in a while, to be savoured by readers for its sharp, smart portraits of longing, connection, and identity.

— Open Book

Rich and poignant … History lovers and literary buffs will sink joyfully into his moving collection … Wang manages to underscore the importance of cultural heritage while stressing humanity’s common ties … His ability to create vivid and believable settings, in beautiful and readable prose, will deeply move readers.

— Winnipeg Free Press

In We Two Alone, Jack Wang has written an instantly engaging and achingly poignant collection of stories about people struggling to preserve their way of life and seeking stability, connection, and meaning. Focusing on Chinese immigrant experiences, Wang’s stories range freely and easily across many decades and a dizzyingly assortment of geographies. All of Wang’s characters are vividly rendered, their struggles and agonies richly conceived and indelibly portrayed. The writing throughout is atmospheric, highly visual, and peppered with startling and persuasive detail. Long after finishing it, We Two Alone lingers in the mind as a compassionate work by a profoundly talented writer who cares deeply about what it means to be human in turbulent times.

— Danuta Gleed Literary Award Jury Citation

A collection that announces an important new voice in contemporary fiction … Beyond Vancouver, Shanghai, Vienna, Port Elizabeth, and London, the stories in We Two Alone encompass Tallahassee, Los Angeles, and Boston. Wang is committed to rendering his backdrops accurately; with perfectly presented details, he showcases the disharmony of the Chinese diaspora, as individuals endure salient moments in twentieth-century history and more recent times … We Two Alone shows that Jack Wang is a master of the short story, a writer who has mapped his own space, neither Canadian nor American, nor anywhere else. Each episode in this collection is a moving tribute to its characters as well as an indictment of the ostracism that remains when racist taunts and human failures continue to bedevil the modern world.

— Literary Review of Canada

Buy this book at:

X
Contacting facebook
Please wait...