Gish Jen Bad Bad Girl review and information of the content of the new novel by the American author of Chinese descent. St. Martin’s Press will publish the new Gish Jen novel, on October 21, 2025.
Gish Jen Bad Bad Girl review
- “What an amazing f***ing novel, wild like love and twice as revealing. Gish Jen has written the multigenerational mother-daughter epic of our new century. Bad Bad Girl spans decades, oceans, continents, generations, languages, showing us we can escape almost anything—except the voices of our parents. Intergenerational mother-daughter mayhem of the absolute best smartest vexing most moving kind.” (Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)
- “Sharp and compassionate … Some relationships are so complex that truth can’t do them justice.” (Bethanne Patrick, Los Angeles Times)
Bad Bad Girl
- Author: Gish Jen (United States)
- Book type: American novel
- Publisher: Knopf
- Released: 21 October 2025
- Length: 353 pages
- Format: hardcover / ebook / audiobook
- Prize: $ 30.00
- Order book from: Amazon / Bol
Blurb of the new novel by Gish Jen
The award-winning author of The Resisters returns with an engrossing, blisteringly funny-sad autobiographical novel tracing a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship.
My mother had died, but still I heard her voice. . .
Gish’s mother, Loo Shu-hsin, is born in 1924 to a wealthy Shanghai family whose girls are expected to restrain themselves. Her beloved nursemaid—far more loving to than her real mother—is torn from her even as she is constantly reprimanded: “Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!” Sent to a modern Catholic school by her progressive father, she receives not only an English name—Agnes—but a first-rate education. To his delight, she excels. But even then he can only sigh, “Too bad. If you were a boy, you could accomplish a lot.” Agnes finds solace in books and, in 1947, announces her intention to pursue a PhD in America. As the Communist revolution looms, she sets sail—never to return.
Lonely and adrift in New York, she begins dating Jen Chao-Pe, an engineering student. They do their best to block out the increasingly dire plight of their families back home and successfully establish a new American life: Marriage! A house in the suburbs! A number one son! By the time Gish is born, though, the news from China is proving inescapable; their marriage is foundering; and Agnes, confronted with a strong-willed, outspoken daughter distinctly reminiscent of herself, is repeating the refrain—“Bad bad girl! You don’t know how to talk!”—as she recapitulates the harshness of her own childhood.
Spanning continents, generations, and cultures, Bad Bad Girl is a novel only Gish Jen could have written: genre-bending, courageous, wise, and as immensely incisive as it is compassionate.
Gish Jen is born August 12, 1955 in Long Island, New York. She is a second-generation Chinese American. Her parents emigrated from China in the 1940s. Bad Bad Girl is het sixth novel. She als published non-fiction. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute and the Guggenheim Foundation as well as of a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and of a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her short work has appeared in the New Yorker and other magazines, and have been chosen for The Best American Short Stories five times, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She delivered the William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in American Studies at Harvard University.
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