Standaard Boekhandel gebruikt cookies en gelijkaardige technologieën om de website goed te laten werken en je een betere surfervaring te bezorgen.
Hieronder kan je kiezen welke cookies je wilt inschakelen:
Technische en functionele cookies
Deze cookies zijn essentieel om de website goed te laten functioneren, en laten je toe om bijvoorbeeld in te loggen. Je kan deze cookies niet uitschakelen.
Analytische cookies
Deze cookies verzamelen anonieme informatie over het gebruik van onze website. Op die manier kunnen we de website beter afstemmen op de behoeften van de gebruikers.
Marketingcookies
Deze cookies delen je gedrag op onze website met externe partijen, zodat je op externe platformen relevantere advertenties van Standaard Boekhandel te zien krijgt.
Je kan maximaal 250 producten tegelijk aan je winkelmandje toevoegen. Verwijdere enkele producten uit je winkelmandje, of splits je bestelling op in meerdere bestellingen.
First published in 1991, Pangs of Love, at once darkly funny and deeply humane, remains a landmark exploration of intimacy, culture, and the quiet wounds we carry, from a pioneer of contemporary Asian American literature.
David Wong Louie’s debut collection of short stories explores love not as comfort but as tension—sharp, embarrassing, and often bruising. His characters, many of them Chinese American men caught between cultural inheritance and American desire, yearn for intimacy, approval, and belonging, even as those longings expose their deepest insecurities.
Across these stories, love collides with race, masculinity, family obligation, and self-loathing. In the widely anthologized “The Girl with the Pimply Face,” an awkward attraction becomes a painful lesson in power and projection, while “Dallas” captures the quiet ache of displacement and moral compromise in a life shaped by migration and unmet ambition. Again and again, Louie shows how moments of connection are inseparable from shame, resentment, and longing.
Written with biting humor and emotional precision, Pangs of Love portrays desire as something that unsettles rather than redeems. These stories reveal how loving—and wanting to be loved—can sharpen one’s awareness of not fitting in, and how the pain of that awareness becomes a defining part of identity.