Leonard Chang

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Leonard Chang is a Korean-American writer of short stories and novels.

His short stories have been published in a variety of literary journals including The Crescent Review, Many Mountains Moving, Lynx Eye, and Prarier Schooner. His novels include Fruit 'N Food (1996), winner of the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction), a story about a loner who finds employment in a New York grocery; major themes include race relations and violence. His other works include: Dispatches from the Cold (1998), and Over The Shoulder (2001), a mystery/noir novel that is also the first story starring his Korean American private-eye protagonist, Allen Choice. Other novels that feature Allen Choice include: Underkill (2003) and Fade To Clear (2004).

Chang's work is unusual in the canon of Asian American literature because of the level of assimilation many of his Korean American characters have achieved. His characters tend to be second or third generation Americans, often with few ties to their ethnic origins. His later works deal less with race relations than with character-driven issues, such as with Allen Choice, whose name ("Choice" changed from the Korean "Choi" by his father) denotes the shift in ethnic identity and themes.

Chang's experiments in genre fiction is related to this shift, since the stories revolve around solving a mystery or crime, and despite the fact that the protagonist is Korean American, the debt here is more to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Ross Macdonald than to Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan or Richard E. Kim.

Still in the early stages of his career, Chang's work is constantly maturing and developing, and what seems to differentiate his work from others of his generation is his singular focus on detailing the Korean American experience as distinctly American.