All the Love in the World

Description

Fiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Short Stories. ALL THE LOVE IN THE WORLD is a debut prose collection by award-winning poet Cathy Song. The deeply personal, interconnected short stories follow highlights in a family history from Korean immigrant grandparents toiling in rural Hawai'i, through a young Asian-American couple's post-World War II life on the mainland and their daughters growing up in Honolulu in the 1960s, to travels in New Zealand and India in the twenty-first century.

With lyric grace and the luminosity that is a distinct signature of her poetry, Cathy Song has created a rich tapestry of powerful stories and vividly drawn characters that can be read both sequentially as a novel and as a short story collection that takes a searching look at the cycle of human existence. Individually the pieces offer a satisfying narrative arc that yields beautifully crafted portraits of real people, the turning points of their lives, their stories of travel, love, aging, and death played out against the changing social andhistorical backdrop of Hawai'i. Collectively the stories affirm the power of memory to redeem, to bridge lives and bind three generations in a timeless tale of love and its endurance. It is a collection to cherish, as much for its compelling images and characters as for its profound wisdom and insights into what it means to be human, to love, to grow old and lose what you love.--Boey Kim Cheng

The best book of short stories I ever read. 'Feeling absorbed instantly into deep cultural resonance, / fascinating places, mixtures and connections, unexpected difficulties, / but most especially, greatest tenderness for a precious, particular / father and family, was a journey of a reader's lifetime as well as a writer's.' This exquisitely written and remembered book is a treasure of love and care.--Naomi Shihab Nye

This powerful and beautiful novel in stories recounts the interconnectedness of the immigrant experience on a global scale. The epic scope of the collection ranges from Hawai'i to Oklahoma to California to New York to New Zealand to India, to name just a few of the stops along the ride. And what a ride it is Beginning with the first generation of the Park family, immigrants to Hawai'i during the Korean diaspora, ALL THE LOVE IN THE WORLD does not merely retrace the painful and familiar struggle by immigrants everywhere to preserve the connection to their cultural inheritance; the book goes deeper in parsing what is left to us when those bonds are broken or erased by the overwhelming pressures to acculturate by a dominant culture. Who do we become? What is to be done? Cathy Song's contemplation of these questions is, in the end, filled with light, untinged by easy despair.--Sylvia Watanabe