Danger and Beauty

Hagedorn muses about love and sex, and probes with wry humor and sharp social satire the heart-and hearbreaks-of the immigrant experience.

"Jessica Hagedorn is one of the best of a new generation of writers who are making American language new and who in the process are creating a new American Literature."-Russell Banks

"[Hagedorn] sees her native land from both near and far, with ambivalent love, the only kind of love worth writing about."-John Updike

Jessica Hagedorn is a performance artist, poet, playwright, and formerly a commentator on NPR. Her novel, Dogeaters, won an American Book Award. Other books include the groundbreaking Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction and The Gangster of Love.