Maxine Hong Kingston

Driven by his dream to write and stage an epic stage production of interwoven Chinese novelsWittman Ah Sing, a Chinese-American hippie in the late '60s.

His Fake Book

Tripmaster Monkey

I did not wait for twenty years to write the pieces in this book, which is like a diary. There is sometimes only a week or two between an event and my writing about it. I wrote about my sonâs surfing upon coming home from it. I wrote about the high school reunion before going to it. The result is that I am making up meanings as I go along. Which is the way I live anyway. There is a lot of detailed doubt here. In this collection of eleven pieces, originally issued as a limited hand-printed edition, Maxine Hong Kingston does not attempt to capture Hawaiâi but "instead and incidentally" to describe her "piece by piece, and hope that the sum praises her." The essays provide readers with a generous sampling of Kingstonâs signature: an angle of vision, exquisitely balanced and clear-sighted, that awakens one to a knowledge of things.

Hawaii One Summer

An outstanding autobiography about growing up female and Chinese American in California. An ALA Outstanding Book for the College Bound.

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

In 'The Fifth Book of Peace', Kingston describes the history of all the lost books of peace - the three that figure in Chinese mythology which scholars and laymen have searched for, hoping to find them in the antidote to 'The Art of War', and her own book, 'Lost in the Flames'.

The Fifth Book of Peace

The largest and most comprehensive edition of our foremost Asian American writer: three classic books and additional writings, many rare, that together offer a vivid and searching portrait of immigrant experience and American dreams. Maxine Hong Kingston made a stunning entrance on the American literary scene with The Woman Warrior (1976), her “memoirs of a childhood among ghosts." Not only an account of growing up poor and Chinese American in the San Joaquin Valley, it was also an audacious feat of imaginative transformation and pathbreaking work of feminist autobiography, drawing on ancient myths and the family stories her mother brought over from China to make sense of a transformed life in America. A companion to The Woman Warrior, which she called her “mother-book,” Kingston’s “father-book” China Men (1980) spreads out across a large geographical and historical canvas to envision the lives of her male relatives who immigrated to America. Taken together, The Woman Warrior and China Men offer a profound, kaleidoscopic, genre-defying narrative of the American experience. Kingston's third book, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), is the wildly inventive story of Wittman Ah Sing, a Berkeley graduate student whose experience of the San Francisco Beat scene transforms his understanding of his own Chinese heritage. Rounding out the volume are a series of essays from 1978 reflecting on her life in Hawaii, later collected as Hawai‘i One Summer, personal musings whose subjects range from the contentions of a conference of Asian American writers to home-buying, surfing, and the work of the Beat poet Lew Welch. Also included are hard-to-find essays about the creative process and Kingston’s exasperated, insightful account of how most of the reviewers of The Woman Warrior fell prey to lazy stereotypes about the “exotic” and “inscrutable” East.

Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, Other Writings (LOA #355)

Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

The Woman Warrior

The author reflects on her life as she turns sixty-five. Told in free verse.

I Love a Broad Margin to My Life

A long time ago in China, there existed three Books of Peace that proved so threatening to the reigning powers that they had them burned. Many years later Maxine Hong Kingston wrote a Fourth Book of Peace, but it too was burned--in the catastrophic Berkeley-Oakland Hills fire of 1991, a fire that coincided with the death of her father. Now in this visionary and redemptive work, Kingston completes her interrupted labor, weaving fiction and memoir into a luminous meditation on war and peace, devastation and renewal.

The National Book Award-winning author of The Woman Warrior presents a series of versed observations on her experiences of aging, covering topics ranging from her literary activities and activist work to her views on her characters and a visit to China. Reprint.

The author of The Woman Warrior presents a first collection of poetry, which is based on her 2000 delivery of the William E. Massey Lectures at Harvard and which explores her quest to become a poet while inviting her muse to assist in her endeavor. (Literature)

To Be the Poet

Maxine Hong Kingston, author of such seminal works as The Woman Warrior and China Men, is one of the most important American writers of her generation. In this remarkable memoir, she writes from the point of view of being sixty-five, looking back on a rich and complex life of literature and political activism, always against the background of what it is like to have a mixed Chinese-American identity. Passages of autobiography, in which she describes such events in her life as being imprisoned with Alice Walker for demonstrating against the Iraq war, meld with a ficitonal journey in which she sends her avatar Wittman Ah Sing on a trip to modern China. She also evokes her own poignant journey, without a guide, back to the Chinese villages her father and mother left in order to come to America.

I Love a Broad Margin To My Life

I have almost finished my longbook, Maxine Hong Kingston declares. "Let my life as Poet begin...I won't be a workhorse anymore; I'll be a skylark." To Be the Poet is Kingston's manifesto, the avowal and declaration of a writer who has devoted a good part of her sixty years to writing prose, and who, over the course of this spirited and inspiring book, works out what the rest of her life will be, in poetry.

A memoir of the author's losses to fire and her work with Vietnam veterans also includes a novel about a Chinese American man and his wife who flee to Hawaii to evade the draft during the Vietnam War, only to work with Vietnam veterans.

Gerald Nicosia

Jerry Kamstra

And Other Memories of China

Night Train to Shanghai

In this collection of interviews, Kingston talks about her life, her writing, and her objectives. From the first, her books have hovered along the hazy line between fiction and nonfiction, memoir and imagination. As she answers her critics and readers, she both clarifies the differences and exults in the difficulties of distinguishing between the remembered and the re-created. She explains how she worked to bridge her parents' Chinese dialect with American slang, how she learned to explore her inheritance and find new relevance in her mother's "talk-stories," and how she developed the complex juxtapositions of myths and memoir that fill her books.

Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston

James D. Houston

Al Young

Jack Hicks

This text is the first volume of a comprehensive anthology of Californian literature. It is divided into four parts and contains material ranging from Native American origin myths to Hollywood novels dissecting the American dream.

Maxine Hong Kingston

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