Alumni Profile at Cornell’s College of Arts & Sciences

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cornell_artsA few months ago, I gave an interview for the revamped website for Cornell’s Colleges of Arts & Sciences:

Sung Woo’s first novel, “Everything Asian,” has just been released. Yet Sung began at Cornell in the College of Engineering, “on a practical career path,” studying material science engineering. “I’ve always been decent in math,” he explains, “and I thought I could grin and bear it for four years.” He lasted one semester.

You can read the rest of it at the Alumni Profiles section.

From Blurbee to Blurber

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From_Wonso_Pond_49dba55b87c1eA few months back, I was approached by the The Feminist Press to check out a book, From Wonso Pond, “A classic revolutionary novel of the 1930s and the first complete work written by a woman before the Korean War to be published in English.”  So after reading it, I emailed them the following:

How refreshing it is to have a good old-fashioned story, told without narrative tricks or artifice.  Kang Kyong-ae’s From Wonso Pond is a powerful novel that charts the struggles of three impassioned characters as they learn to live, work, and love.  The questions she poses and the issues she tackles are as universal as they are enduring.  This essential work should be required reading for anyone interested in Korean culture.

– Sung J. Woo, author of Everything Asian: A Novel

And just like that, I went from being a blurbee to a blurber.  The story is a throwback, and it has the same sort of passion Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle does.

And on the subject of working hard for a living, tomorrow, I’ll be at Chicklet Book’s Author! Author! Book Festival in Princeton, signing books from 1pm to 3pm at the Signing Tent with fellow authors Victoria Adler, Jean Hollander, DeBerry & Grant, Meg Cox, Elizabeth Joy Arnold, and Lara M. Zeises.  The festival is on from 10am until 4pm, so come on by and say hello if you are in the area.

A Review, A Sale, and Some Readings

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A quick roundup of recent happenings:

1) UPI Asia recently reviewed the novel:

While Everything Asian is a story of the immigrant experience in which culture clash plays a strong role, it strays from the typical (adult) view and goes both small and large: small in the sense that protagonist Joon (David) Kim is just twelve and large in that the novel’s second story points towards a bigger picture. Peddlers Town is its own community — shop and restaurant owners coming and going as the Kims work their way towards the American Dream.

[read more]

bird-figurine-5502) My Significant Object ended up selling for $52, which is no small potatoes.  In fact, I think I can buy at least a few hundred potatoes for that amount.  My hearty thank you to the story lover and eBayer who purchased the little bird and the little story.

3) I have two readings coming up this weekend, one in Baltimore and one in DC.  If you happen to be in the area, come on by and say hello.

Significant Object: Bird Figurine

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bird-figurine-550

Last summer, my wife and I held a barbeque in our back yard. After the event, I saw a little yellow bird with a black crown and wings on the knickknack shelf above the toilet in the bathroom. I’d never seen this figurine before. The bird, its head turned ninety degrees to the left of its body, gazed at me squarely with unblinking black eyes.

When I asked my wife about where she got the figurine, she had no idea what I was talking about. The figurine suddenly took on the cold heft of an object that existed only to tell us how much it didn’t belong here.

[read more]

[bid on the object on eBay]

[about the Significant Objects project]