Lannan Foundation

Gish Jen, Writer - Marfa, Fall 2003

Gish Jen has published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, among other periodicals, as well as in numerous textbooks and anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike.

Jen has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Fulbright Program, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently holds a Strauss Living from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1999 she was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.

She has published three novels. Her first book, Typical American (Houghton Mifflin, 1991), was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Its sequel, Mona in the Promised Land (Knopf, 1996), was named one of the ten best books of 1996 by The Los Angeles Times. Her third novel is called The Love Wife. A story collection, Who’s Irish?, was published by Knopf in 1999.  All of her books have been New York Times notable books.