Hunger is a short story collection by American writer Lan Samantha Chang, published in 1998 by W. W. Norton.

It won the Commonwealth Club of California's California Book Award's Silver Medal for Fiction^[1] and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.^[2]

Hunger includes the titular novella and five short stories: "The Unforgetting", "The Eve of the Spirit Festival", "Water Names", "Pipa's Story" and "San".

The narratives follow Chinese Americans in the US and China, and they explore home, family, and loss.

Hunger is Chang's debut book of fiction. The stories were inspired by her parents' "sense of disengagement" after leaving China for the US. She described her characters as "fictional contemporaries" of her parents, whom she "created to better understand the reasons for generational silence".^[3]

In the house she grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, there was "no sense of family history". The book was her way of addressing the strife occasioned by such silence. She cited as inspiration the fiction of Jewish writers Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth, who, she said, "write about very fraught communication between parents and children".^[4]

In 2023, W.W. Norton announced a 25th anniversary reissue of Hunger.^[9] In a comment to The Washington Post, Min Jin Lee said: "I read Hunger again this fall, because I return to great work when I need to be nourished. A literary classic, Chang’s collection is a remarkable achievement and turns a quarter of a century next year."^[10]