Dec 25, 2009

Immigration Blues | Critical Overview

‘‘Immigration Blues’’ won the New Letters award for fiction from the University of Missouri at Kansas City in 1977. In 1978 it was listed as an honorable mention in Best American Short Stories. In 1981 the second edition of Scent of Apples, the book in which the story appears, received an American Book Award from New York’s Pre-Columbus Federation.

Anthony Tan, writing in Silliman Journal, calls the stories in Scent of Apples ‘‘emotionally poignant’’ and says ‘‘Immigration Blues’’ is ‘‘a story of understated pathos and the...