Deceit and Other Possibilities: Stories Audiobook

In her powerful collection, first published in 2016 and now featuring new stories, Vanessa Hua gives voice to immigrant families navigating a new America. Tied to their ancestral and adopted homelands in ways unimaginable in generations past, these memorable characters straddle both worlds but belong to none.

From a Hong Kong movie idol fleeing a sex scandal to an obedient daughter turned Stanford pretender, from a Chinatown elder summoned to his village to a Korean American pastor with a secret agenda, the characters in the collection illustrate the conflict between self and society, tradition and change. In "What We Have Is What We Need," winner of the Atlantic's Student Writing Contest, a boy from Mexico reunites with his parents in San Francisco. When he suspects his mother has found love elsewhere, he fights to keep his family together.

With insight and wit, Hua writes about what wounds us and what we must survive. This all-new edition of Deceit and Other Possibilities marks the emergence of a remarkable writer.

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“The stories escalated as I progressed through the collection, finishing with three exceptional pieces where the issue of race emerges organically out of the characters and situations. In these the compressed denouements poignantly accentuate the pretty stories the protagonists tell themselves to generate hope.”

— Literary Review