H & G - Softcover

Hong, Anna Maria

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1940090083 ISBN 13: 9781940090085

Publisher: Sidebrow Books, 2018

Synopsis

Fiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. In this hybrid novella of trauma and survival, Anna Maria Hong re-imagines and extends the tale of Hansel and Gretel, breaking its received patterns of abandonment and abuse to set G. to wander a world racialized and gendered by power dynamics at every turn. Survivor, artist, hero, G.'s decisive action at the Witch's oven becomes the kernel of a new identity, independent and resilient, capable of transforming cruel stories into a cunning, masterful feminist bildungsroman.

"In H & G, Anna Maria Hong brilliantly re-visions the 'Hansel and Gretel' fairytale for the post-post-modern 21st century. Or explodes it, producing a text brimming with biting wit, feminist insight, psychological incisiveness, and a hybrid narrative daring that turns genre on its head. G., a 'Korean American fraülein' who is 'sick of the high road' is willing to tear the whole fantasy edifice of our illusions down as she journeys toward deeper truths, and thankfully, she and H. take us along for their sometimes-frightening, always enlightening rides." --John Keene

About this title

About the Author:

Anna Maria Hong's first poetry collection, AGE OF GLASS, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's 2017 First Book Poetry Competition and will be published in early 2018. Her second poetry collection, FABLESQUE, won Tupelo Press's Berkshire Prize and is forthcoming in 2019. She is also the author of H & G (Sidebrow Books, 2018). A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published fiction and poetry in over 50 journals and anthologies including The Nation, The Iowa Review, Poetry, Ecotone, Mandorla, Green Mountains Review, Bennington Review, Conduit, Fence, Harvard Review, Southwest Review, The Volta, and The Best American Poetry. She will join the Literature faculty at Bennington College in July 2018.

Review:

"In H & G, Anna Maria Hong brilliantly re-visions the 'Hansel and Gretel' fairytale for the post-post-modern 21st century. Or explodes it, producing a text brimming with biting wit, feminist insight, psychological incisiveness, and a hybrid narrative daring that turns genre on its head. G., a 'Korean American fraülein' who is 'sick of the high road' is willing to tear the whole fantasy edifice of our illusions down as she journeys toward deeper truths, and thankfully, she and H. take us along for their sometimes-frightening, always enlightening rides." --John Keene, author of Counternarratives

"H & G is more than a fractured fairy tale for the Doom Generation. It's a mordantly funny dismantling of loss and abandonment, a game of Chutes & Ladders played by Angela Carter and the Woolf of Orlando, a spider that waits for its victim to stop struggling before moving in. It suggests that the great escape is just the prelude to an unhappily ever after in which old traumas collapse under the weight of new discoveries. It is a brilliant, bracing book." --Josh Emmons, author of A Moral Tale and Other Moral Tales and The Loss of Leon Meed

"This prose, built closely beside one of the most primeval European tales, is full of delectably strong phrasal nuggets and more. Anna Maria Hong unfastens and opens the original narrative, filling in all the icy distress that we already know, then adds the allure of burning sugar." --Stacey Levine, author of The Girl With Brown Fur and Frances Johnson

About this edition

• Publisher: Sidebrow Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1940090083
• ISBN 13: 9781940090085
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 59