The Crazed

Ha Jin takes the lead of ordinary life and turns it into gold. . . . Haunting . . . wrenching. . . . A work that deserves to be immortal. The Washington Post

Ha Jin s empathy for his characters is matched by his unwillingness to give them a break. Reading him is almost like falling in love: you experience anxiety, profound self-consciousness, and an uncomfortable sensitivity to the world and somehow it s a pleasure. . . . Like the best realist writers, Ha Jin sneaks emotional power into the plainest declarative sentences. The New Yorker

A work of enormous intelligence. Piercing, critical, but leavened by Jin s understated prose, The Crazed is a substantial addition to the corpus of a great author. San Francisco Chronicle

A work of literature, in the highest tradition of Anton Chekhov or Yasunari Kawabata, suffused with an aching purity. Houston Chronicle