Comments on: Bio

By: What We Teach When We Teach Writers: On the Quantifiable and the Uncertain « Rose O'Neill Literary House

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:04:07 +0000

[...] Sonya Chung has written an insightful piece on the writing life for The Millions. The essay’s central message is simple (and useful to all of us): keep writing. Chung also quotes Monday’s LitHouse guest Junot Díaz regarding the process of writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, five years into it: [...]

By: The Nervous Breakdown

The Nervous Breakdown — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 23:30:16 +0000

[...] her mind she was thinking, “It is?” She and I have both been invited to do guest-blogging and interviews and events; so maybe that’s the red herring as far as a book’s “success”? Sales is its [...]

By: Fiction Writers Review » Blog Archive » Long for This World by Sonya Chung

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:51:02 +0000

[...] cover of Sonya Chung’s debut novel, Long for This World (Scribner, March 2010), shows a young woman gazing out over a [...]

By: Barrie-Lee

Barrie-Lee — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:47:28 +0000

Dear Sonya,
I just read your opinion about Lit vs. Genre fiction from your article that included Sherman Alexie’s quote about being taken for Goliath instead of David. I wanted to tell you that recently I’ve also noticed, with dismay, that many of the “Moms” on the school blacktop have stooped to reading the vampire books for teenage girls. It makes me want to divorce my girlfriends. Still, on Victoria Lautman’s Writers on the Record (on Chicago Public Radio) I’ve heard a few authors talking about their guilty pleasures of reading genre fiction and how they intend to break out of conventional writing and perhaps blend their writing. I’m not positive, but I think the writers I’ve heard mention this include Michael Cunningam, Jonathan Safran Foer (who loves Joseph Cornell and his abilities to create a message succinctly through art), and even Junot Diaz who embraces language in a clearly no-snobby way. These guys made me smile, because they wanted to break convention. JSF even said that some bad books have a place so that good ones can be written. We’ll see what they can come up with – and how book publishers will market them. Thank you for your convictions. Today, especially in the book publishing world, it’s hard to stand on strong literary legs.