Come through for a special evening featuring four emerging writers on family trauma and celebrating the release of the debut novel by Esme Wang. She’ll be joined by Whiting Award Winner Alice Sola Kim and New Yorker contributor Wei Tchou in conversation with novelist Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.
In Esme Wang’s new novel The Border of Paradise (Unnamed Press 2016), David, a neurotic traumatized American, escapes the States to Kaoshiung, Taiwan. There, he meets Jia-Hui, a woman he marries and has a child with in California. But a few years later, David has another child with an old flame and commits suicide, and Jia-Hui takes the second child under her wing, practicing the old-fashioned Chinese tradition in which families adopt poor girls to raise and eventually marry their sons. As NPR wrote: “Wang’s prose is beautiful and restrained, and her generous, precise characterization makes every perspective feel organic and utterly real in the face of increasingly theatrical circumstances. The result — the story of an American family stretched and manipulated into impossible shapes — is an extraordinary literary and gothic novel of the highest order.” Published in The Believer, The New Inquiry, Catapult, and Salon, Esme was also interviewed by Larissa Pham for The Margins.
Winner of the 2016 Whiting Award and grants from MacDowell and Bread Loaf, Alice Sola Kim has been published or is forthcoming in Tin House, McSweeney’s Literary Quarterly, BuzzFeed Books, and AAWW’s forthcoming anthology with the Feminist Press, Go Home!. She and her family were deported at a young age to Korea and later immigrated back to the United States.
The New Yorker Contributor Wei Tchou is a 2016 AAWW Margins Fellow, for which she is finishing a book of non-narrative essays about her family. She hopes to explore the way illness and alienation affect a person’s identity and relationship to relatives and to their past.
Moderated by 2015 AAWW Margins Fellow Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, the author of the forthcoming novel Harmless Like You and editor of the AAWW-Feminist Press anthology Go Home!. Check out her flash fiction for The Margins, Then I Was Blue, as well as her online comics, Red Squiggle and Flowers of Yarn.
$5 suggested donation
Open to the public
RESERVE A SEAT!
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