Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award

Here are ten stories that wound and satisfy in equal measure. Kathryn Ma probes the immigrant experience, most particularly among northern California's Chinese Americans, illuminating for us the confounding nature of duty, transformation, and loss. A boy exposed to racial hatred finds out the true difference between his mother and his father. Two old rivals briefly lay down their weapons, but loneliness and despair won't let them forget the past. A young Beijing tour guide with a terrible family secret must take an adopted Chinese girl and her American family to visit an orphanage. And in the prize-winning title story, a mother refuses to let her son save her life, insisting instead on a sacrifice by her daughter.

Intimate in detail and universal in theme, these stories give us the compelling voice of an exciting author whose intelligence, insight, and wit imparts a sense of grace to the bitter resentments and enduring ties that comprise family love. Even through the tensions, the peace and security that come from building and belonging to one's own community shine forth.

Praise & Reviews for All That Work and Still No Boys

“With subtle intelligence and wry humor, Kathryn Ma brings us characters whose lives are complicated—in all the best ways—by family, race, immigration, and quirks of personality. These wonderful stories have the resonance of truth even as they make you see the world in new ways.”
– Curtis Sittenfeld, author of Rodham

“Kathryn Ma's emotional precision sheds new light on the interworkings of families... and her powers are on marvelous display in this fine debut collection of stories....All That Work and Still No Boys marks the arrival of a deeply compassionate and subtle writer in possession of a keen sense of character and an impressive dexterity of language." – Laura van den Berg, Ploughshares

 “Ma collects 10 stories full of quiet astonishments....stunning...." – Stanford Magazine

 These 10 stories offer an intimate look at Chinese-American life; the careful distances, the family obligations, the wounded pride and myriad slights that fester over generations. Ma's stories are layered....there are no good guys, no bad guys, just the deep suffering that ripples through families – the things that everyone knows and no one talks about." – Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times

“Throughout the book – the winner of the illustrious 2009 Iowa Short Fiction Prize – Ma's mostly Chinese American characters confront the long arm of cultural traditions and the pain of immigration and assimilation with a pitch-perfect subtlety that many Asian American writers miss.  Her detailed and intimate understandings of relationships remind me of Jhumpa Lahiri's work, but Ma brings a humor and messiness....Ma's extremely readable prose carried me through this slim collection almost too fast, leaving me wanting more.  This book is one of the most promising fiction debuts I've read in a long time."– Neelanjana Banerjee, Hyphen Magazine

“Kathryn Ma's All That Work and Still No Boys negotiates with a brisk and wry dispatch the minor and major agonies of family crises, and renders with admirable efficiency and power the subterranean stresses in any intimate history. Her characters and relationships are rendered with an enviable grace and a clarity and a compassionate insight that honors both their pain and their ongoing attempts, however imperfect, to pitch in on one another's behalf.”– Jim Shepard, author of Like You’d Understand, Anyway

“Kathryn Ma is a wonderful writer. Subtle, complex, funny, touching, these stories deliver a world of characters I shall not forget.” – Lynn Freed, author of The Servants' Quarters

“Kathryn Ma writes with wit and an incisive light touch about a range of characters, nationalities, ages, and temperaments. Particularly skillful at revealing the nuances, contradictions, and stresses inner and outer that make us alike in need, she had me leaning into these stories page after page. A wonderful debut from a talented writer.” – Ehud Havazelet, author of Bearing the Body