Yearly Archives: 2009

BookBrowse, Reviews, and Another Kind of Review

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Catching up:

1) I’ll be on the front page of BookBrowse for one more day.  So if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s your chance.

2) A review from Asian American Literature Fans:

I spent most of yesterday reading Sung J. Woo’s Everything Asian.  Reading has always been for me, in the end, a source of entertainment and pleasure and such was the case with Woo’s felicitous first novel.

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3) A review from LibrarysCat, a LibraryThing Early Reviewer:

While I do not know David Kim, his sister, parents, or friends, I can certainly feel their pangs of growth in this process of acculturation in Sung J. Woo’s debut novel Everything Asian.

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4) From Fiction Writers Review:

Highlights for fiction writers included a morning talk by Sung Woo (Everything Asian), entitled “Finishing Your First Novel: A Three-Pronged Attack,” which gave writers thoughtful advice on how to sustain the writing process over the course of many years and many more pages.

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AABF: Day 2

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aabflogoThe second day of the Ann Arbor Book Festival is history, and so am I.  Tomorrow I’m doing my best Willie Nelson imitation, on the road again, trekking from Michigan back to New Jersey.  On the drive over, I listened to William Shatner’s extremely entertaining Up Till Now, his autobiography.  I still have a couple of hours to go, and after that’s done, I’ll need to kill another seven hours or so with another audiobook.

The best way to recount the day may be through photos, so here they come.

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AABF: Finishing Your First Novel – A Three-Pronged Attack

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aabflogoThe day was long and the night is growing short.  My session at 10am (“Finishing Your First Novel – A Three-Pronged Attack”) went very well (p.s., for the folks who were there and are looking for the supporting material).  Elizabeth Kostova‘s keynote was informative and entertaining, and Colson Whitehead‘s session was an absolute laughfest.  I also got to meet Jeremiah Chamberlin of Fiction Writers Review, Dan Wickett of Dzanc Books, and a great number of the Third Annual Writer’s Conference participants.

Up tomorrow is the author breakfast at 8:30am and then the debut novel panel with Katie Crouch at 1:30pm.  I’m looking forward to attending the Place as Theme panel with Colson Whitehead, Valerie Laken, and Steve Amick at 3pm.  Everything after the breakfast is free and open to the public, so if you are in the area, please stop by the AABF street festival!

Ann Arbor Book Festival

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aabflogoThe Ann Arbor Book Festival is almost here!  I’ll be participating in the festival on both Friday and Saturday, so please come on by.  There’s a huge number of events happening; the following is a list of my appearances:

Friday, May 15, 10am
Writer’s Conference Session
Palmer Commons, 100 Washtenaw Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48109
“Finishing Your First Novel: A Three-Pronged Attack”

Friday, May 15, 6-7:30pm
Author Reception
Ann Arbor District Library, 343 S. Fifth Ave. Ann Arbor, MI 48104

Saturday, May 16, 8:30am
Author Breakfast
Hussey Room, 2nd floor of the Michigan League, 911 N. University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Saturday, May 16, 1:30pm
Debut Novels; with Katie Crouch
Stage 2, Ingalls Mall, 915 E Washington St., Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109

A Mom and Pop Store, and Then Some

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generations_retailI knew how to count from 1 to 10 in English. I could recite the alphabet. And that was about it.

Ronald Reagan was starting his first term as president when I immigrated from South Korea with my mother and two older sisters. We came to reunite with my father, who had set up an Asian gift shop in Manasquan, N.J., and there I was, 10 years old and fresh off the plane, standing behind the bank of showcases in the middle of our store, waiting to serve customers.

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An essay on the realities of retail that I wrote for the Times.

Brockmeier’s The Truth About Celia

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I can’t remember the last time I read a book in a matter of two days.  However, I do remember when I last read a book in a single day, because that was 1987, when I started reading Stephen King’s Misery at nine in the morning and finished it at nine at night.  Nowadays I’m lucky to finish a book in a month.

celiaFor my sloth-like slowdown, I’d like to cast blame on the Internet, but I digress.  This is a post about Kevin Brockmeier’s The Truth About Celia, his first novel which is actually more like a novel-in-stories like my own debut.  I think that’s about it when it comes to drawing parallels between myself and Brockmeier, because he’s in an entirely different league when it comes to wordcraft and worldcraft.  Brockmeier fuses reality and fantasy like nobody else.

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The Z That Somehow Became a ts

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89It had to happen sooner or later, I suppose.  I knew one day I would find a typo in the book, and that day turned out to be Thursday evening.  After the Boston Public Library reading, a friend was kind enough to throw me a book party at her place, and I decided to read from the chapter “In Young Kim,” starting on page 89.  And as I was reading it out loud, I saw it on the second paragraph:

“The best she could do was peejaa because there was no such sound as ts in Korean, but this was not important.”

I suppose it’s technically true — there is no such sound as “ts” in Korean.  But it’s wrong!  It should’ve been the letter “Z,” and I have proof.  On the galleys (the advance readers copy), this was correctly laid out, as you can see from the graphic (click it to see the scanned page in full — I’ve underlined it).

So the letter Z somehow became a ts.  And all I can say to that is…tsk tsk tsk.  What can you do — the book is now in print, so the best I can hope is that the paperback edition will reflect the correction.

Dear readers, if you find more typos, please let me know.  You’ll have my eternal gratitude.

First Time Out @ Boston Public Library, 4/30 6PM

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I’ll be appearing with Tania James and Marc Fitten at the Boston Public Library tomorrow:

firsttimeout

First Time Out: Debut Novelists Share Their Stories

Thursday, April 30, 6 p.m.
Orientation Room, Central Library, Copley Square

Marc Fitten, Tania James and Sung J. Woo have very little in common on the surface, but all three are the authors of debut novels, and at this very special panel event, we will dig down to find out just how they really are different, and how they might be similar.

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Read-It-First!

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readitfirst_logoThis week, my book is being excerpted at Read-It-First:

Join St. Martin’s Read-it-First e-mail book club and sample a hot new release each week. Each weekday morning, we’ll send you a taste of the week’s featured title right to your inbox. By the end of the week, you’ll have read approximately a few chapters, enough to decide whether it is the right book for you.

So if you haven’t signed up yet, there’s no time like the present.