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. This collection combines some of her greatest work into an accessible hardback format.
This is a delightful book . . . tells more than I ever imagined about the strangeness of being Chinese and a woman; it also gives a superb account of what it's like simply to be alive -- Victoria Radin - New Society
A strange, enchanting book . . . As a manual of self-discovery through the channels and terrors of one's own rejected communal memory, it is unbeatable - Guardian
As a dream - of the female avenger - it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword . . . reimagining the past with such dark beauty, such precision and anger that you feel you have saddled the Tao dragon and see all through the fiery eye of God -- John Leonard - New York Times
A book of fierce clarity and originality - Newsweek
It [has] crossed cultural boundaries and fused literary genres in startlingly original ways - Guardian
