The backstory essay I’d written for M.J. Rose’s blog has been reprinted in Visual Thesaurus.  This is quite a tool, by the way, very intuitive and easy to use.

And Everything Asian is now on Google Books.  It’s a limited preview like most commercial titles, but you can see more of the contents than anywhere else online.

It 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.

This 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.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

While Woo is writing an immigrant coming-of-age tale, the emotions and sheer messiness of the Kims’ home life will resonate with anyone in possession of a relative. And while bad ‘80s fashion (and was there any other kind?) is always a reliable target, Woo’s novel has a tenderness underlying the humor and his characters are complicatedly human.

[read more]