Adjunct Professor Jenny Zhang Awarded PEN Prize for Debut Fiction

March 21, 2018
Sour Heart book cover

Adjunct faculty member Jenny Zhang was awarded the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for her short story collection, Sour Heart (Penguin Random House).

The organization called it “a stark depiction of hardscrabble Chinese American adolescence in New York City.”

The collection “combines ingenious and tightly controlled technical artistry with an unfettered emotional directness that frequently moves, within single sentences, from overwhelming beauty to abject pain,” according to a review in the New Yorker.

Zhang has won praise from dozens of outlets for her debut collection, which was published via the newly launched Lenny book imprint, under the Random House umbrella. Lenny is a weekly online feminist newsletter created by Lena Dunham and Jennifer Konner, and Sour Heart was the first book the team worked on, prompting Vanity Fair to call Lena Dunham Zhang's "Literary Fairy Godmother". 

Sour Heart was also nominated for the L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.