Madcap stories of mayhem! A sculptor turned Brussels sprouts farmer, an indicted movie producer, and an alcoholic kung-fu diva are just a few of the characters in Don Lee’sWrack and Ruin (W.W. Norton, 2008), a suspenseful and satirical comedy of errors that culminates in literature’s first-ever windsurfing chase scene. A tragicomic take on crime fiction, Francie Lin’s The Foreigner (Picador, 2008) chronicles the journey of Emerson Chang as he is thrust out of his quiet and uneventful life into the throws of the Taiwanese underworld courtesy of his brother Little P and his friends, Atticus, Big One, and Poison.
A third-generation Korean American, Don Lee spent the majority of his childhood in Tokyo and Seoul. Formerly the editor of the Ploughshares literary journal, Lee has received an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize, and his stories have been published in The Kenyon Review, GQ, and New England Review. He is the author of the American Book Award-winning novel, Country of Origin (W.W. Norton, 2005) and the story collection Yellow (W.W. Norton, 2002), which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Members’ Choice Award from The Asian American Writers’ Workshop. The Washington Post describes Wrack and Ruin saying, “brilliant farce conveys a sense of the characters’ agony, and that is true here. But there are also moments of gentle joy, and the author’s affection for this little corner of the world can be infectious.” In November 2007, Don Lee received the inaugural Fred R. Brown Literary Award for emerging novelists from the University of Pittsburgh’s creative writing program.
Francie Lin is a former editor at The Threepenny Review and the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan in 2001-2002. She lives in Greenfield, Massachusetts. The San Francisco Chronicle describes Lin’s debut novel, The Foreigner, saying, “[Lin] demonstrates an admirable range and skill in The Foreigner. She’s capable of writing both marvelous humor and scenes of utter darkness in her tale of a naive man at a complete loss for dealing with the world.
