Jess Row is the author of two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost, a novel, Your Face in Mine, and a collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, have been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and have won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction, and a 2003 Whiting Award in Fiction. In 2007, he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among other venues. He teaches full time at The College of New Jersey and lives in New York City with his wife and their two children. A student of Zen for more than twenty years, he is an ordained dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen.
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The Train to Lo WuStoriesFrom"For You"
Rising at four, the students bow to the Buddha one hundred and eight times, and sit meditation for an hour before breakfast, heads rolling into sleep and jerking awake. At the end of the working period the sun rises, a clear, distant light over Su Dok Mountain; they put aside brooms and wheelbarrows and return to the meditation hall. When it sets, at four in the afternoon, it seems only a few hours have passed. An apprentice monk climbs the drum tower and beats a steady rhythm as he falls into shadow.
The Train to Lo Wu:Stories -
The Train to Lo WuStoriesFrom"The Train to Lo Wu"
I want to have a kindergarten. She bit down on her lower lip, scraping it with her teeth. Not work in one. I’ve done that. I want to have a private kindergarten, like they do in Shanghai and Beijing, where the parents pay. That way you can have enough blankets and cots and chair for every student. You can do painting and music and teach English. And you can get your own cook and have decent food. Only a certain number of students admitted each year.
The Train to Lo Wu:Stories -
The Train to Lo WuStoriesFrom"The Ferry"
Hong Kong is like no place he has ever imagined. Green hillsides rising out of a steel-colored sea. Rows of identical white apartment blocks that seem to sprout from low-hanging clouds, like mushrooms after rain. When he steps outside the airport terminal the air sticks to his skin, and he feels queasy, his joints rubbery, a bad taste in his mouth. He’d give anything for a shower.
The Train to Lo Wu:Stories
“This book is adult in its weight and complexity, and formidable in its thoughtfulness . . . [Row] doesn’t shy away from the hard intellectual and moral questions his story raises, or from grainy philosophical dialogue, but he submerges these things in a narrative that burns with a steady flame. You turn the pages without being aware you are turning them.” —The New York Times [on Your Face in Mine]
“The premise is headline-catching, but the subtlety and grace with which Row tells the story is even more remarkable . . . We book reviewers are fond of calling books ‘brave,’ but Your Face in Mine is genuinely courageous.” —NPR
“Nobody Ever Gets Lost is that rare work which can boast both focus and scope. It is a powerful book, raw and shrewd and brave. If the categorical assertion of the title is true, it must be because the world only ever moves in one direction: forward. Visions of purity—ethnic, religious, national, or other—are always reactionary and will always fail. Restoration of the past is impossible, and calling for it merely exposes the weak soul’s fear of the future.” —Bookforum
Selected Works
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