The Sorrows of Others

is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short stories have appeared in A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She grew up in Austin, Texas, and now lives in New York City where she is an associate editor at Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. In 2023, she was selected as a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree. The Sorrows of Others is her first book.

Lori Feathers is a freelance book critic and co-owner and founder of Interabang Books in Dallas, Texas, where she works as the store’s book buyer. She is the creator and co-host of the critically acclaimed books podcast, “Across the Pond” and the founder and Chair of the Republic of Consciousness Prize, US and Canada, a prize honoring the work of small publishers. Her work has been published in LitHub and many other publications, and she served as an elected board member of the National Book Critics Circle for six years.

In New York City, an art student finds an unexpected subject when she moves in with a grandmother from Xi’an, and boundaries are put into question. When a newlywed couple moves to Arizona, adapting to unfamiliar customs keeps their marriage from falling apart. A woman grapples with what it means to care for another, and the limits of that care, when her dying husband returns from Beijing years after abandoning her. And during a rainy summer in Texas, a visitor exposes the unspoken but unburiable history that binds two families together. Ada Zhang writes with startling honesty and love about lives young and old, in a stunning debut that explores what happens when we leave home and what happens when we stay, and the selves we meet and shed in the process of becoming.