Disturbance-Loving Species: A Novella and Stories

Peter Chilson

Aug 2007 · HarperCollins

About this ebook

Peter Chilson’s fiction debut delivers a fascinating, heart-wrenching view of modern African culture, filtered through the lens of the West. In a novella and four short stories, Chilson, who traveled to Africa first as a Peace Corps volunteer and later as a freelance journalist, uses a phrase borrowed from biology to point out how our “disturbance-loving species” thrives in the most chaotic, seemingly unlivable situations. As this remarkable collection explores the experiences of Americans struggling to cope with the political and social upheaval of life in Africa and of Africans acclimating to life in the United States, Chilson captures in vivid detail the strange, exhilarating frisson between cultures.

About the author

Lan Samantha Chang was born, 1965, and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin. She is the daughter of Chinese parents who survived the World War II Japanese occupation of China and later immigrated to the United States. Chang attended Yale University, first as a premedical student and then as an East Asian studies major. She went on to earn an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. In her fiction, she focuses on the fragility of family relationships and the Chinese American immigrant experience. Chang's "Pipa's Story" was selected for Best American Short Stories 1994. Her books include All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010), Hunger (W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), Inheritance (W. W. Norton & Company, 2004).