Maxine Hong Kingston's Books
Jan.18.2011
In her singular voice—humble, elegiac, practical—Maxine Hong Kingston sets out to reflect on aging as she turns sixty-five.
Kingston's swift, effortlessly flowing verse lines feel instantly natural in this fresh approach to the art of memoir, as she circles from present to past and back, from lunch with a writer friend to the funeral of a Vietnam veteran, from her long...
Sep.11.2007
The itch to make dark marks on paper is shared by many writers and artists,” begins John Updike in his essay in The Writer’s Brush, and this stunning collection will amaze lovers of the literary and fine arts alike. Author Donald Friedman has gathered four hundred paintings, drawings, and scultpure—many from private collections, never before published—by more than two hundred of...
Sep.28.2006
This poignant collection, compiled from Kingston’s healing workshops, contains the distilled wisdom of survivors of five wars, including combatants, war widows, spouses, children, conscientious objectors, and veterans of domestic abuse. Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace includes accounts from people that grew up in military families, served as medics in the thick of war, or came...
Sep.01.2004
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 Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire of 1991, a fire that coincided with the death of her father. Now in this visionary and redemptive work,...
Sep.16.2002
“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...
Dec.01.1998
In this collection of eleven pieces, originally issued as a limited hand-printed edition, Maxine Hong Kingston does not attempt to capture Hawai’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 Kingston’s signature: an angle of vision, exquisitely balanced and clear-sighted,...
Aug.01.1998
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...
Jun.19.1990
Young Chinese American Wittman Ah Sing, a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley and student of the 1960s, is an absolutely extraordinary fictional creation. He’s skinny, hip, six feet tall, an unstoppable playwright, a poet, a genius, and a nut. A fifth-generation Californian, he feels alien to both his Chinese heritage and the American culture that stereotypes...
Apr.23.1989
The author chronicles the lives of three generations of Chinese men in America, woven from memory, myth and fact. Here’s a storyteller’s tale of what they endured in a strange new land.
Apr.23.1989
The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother’s mesmerizing “talk-story” tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author’s America is a...
From the explosion in creative writing programs and workshops to the poetry slams and open mikes in every city to the reading groups venturing beyond prose for the first time, poetry is suddenly everywhere. This vibrant anthology showcases unforgettable poems and photographic portraits of leading writers in the United States, together with a CD that features many of the poets...
About Maxine
Maxine Hong Kingston was born on October 27th, 1940, in Stockton, California. She was the first of six American-born children; her parents, Tom and Ying Lan Hong, had had two children in China before they came to America. Her mother trained as a midwife in To...
Causes Maxine Kingston Supports
Amnesty International