Her works include five novels: Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, The Love Wife, World and Town and The Resisters.

World and Town won the 2011 Massachusetts Book Prize in fiction and was nominated for the 2012 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

It consists of eleven interconnected stories that span the 50 years since Nixon's historic visit to China and meeting with Chairman Mao.

Based on the Massey Lectures that Jen delivered at Harvard in 2012, Tiger Writing explores East–West differences in self construction, and how these affect art and especially literature.

[9] Jen's second work of non-fiction is "The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap," published in February 2017.

This is a provocative study of the different ideas Easterners and Westerners have about the self and society and what this means for current debates in art, education, geopolitics, and business.

And in 2000, in a millennial edition of The Times Magazine in the UK, in which figures were asked to name their successors in the 21st century, John Updike picked Jen.