A review by kuhrin
Who's Irish?: Stories by Gish Jen

4.0

What a great collection of stories. I picked this up after reading a [a:Samantha Lan Chang|8858|Lan Samantha Chang|http://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1277823829p2/8858.jpg] interview where she cites Gish as a similar author. Gish has a wonderful roughness to her writing, a deadpan humor that eases the harshness of the stories. While I wouldn't necessarily compare these stories with Chang's, I'm eager to pick up a novel.

House, House, Home, the last story in the book, really got into the question of voluntary exclusion. Juxtaposing an eccentric and affluent art professor with Pammie, a child of immigrant parents who was raised poor and with struggle, told a bigger story of how we ascribe ourselves to an identify just as much as we rebel against that which we came from.