I’ll be appearing with Tania James and Marc Fitten at the Boston Public Library tomorrow:
First Time Out: Debut Novelists Share Their Stories
Thursday, April 30, 6 p.m.
Orientation Room, Central Library, Copley SquareMarc 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.
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.
As it turns out, you can go home again — and thank goodness for that. This was my hometown reading, at the Borders I visit at least once a month. In attendance was my first ESL teacher, the person who taught me how to read, write, and speak this language I now know so well. In addition to the novel, I also read my short story “Limits.” It was a fitting piece to read, since the bulk of the people there (my high school friends) knew the actual story the fiction was based on.
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.
To quote another fine New Jersey artist — oh what a night! I live in the wonderful town of Washington in beautiful Warren County, and I can literally walk to the Warren County Community College. This was my second reading, and I read most of the first chapter to keep it around twenty minutes, but that’s not all — I got to share the stage with the students who won the 2009 Warren County High School Fiction and Poetry Contests. Plus we were also celebrating the release of Ars Poetica, the art/literary magazine of the college, so many of the authors who were published in the journal got up to read as well. Professor BJ Ward was the master of ceremonies, and he gave me an introduction that I didn’t deserve (which didn’t stop me from accepting it with great thanks). It was an evening of literary community in my very home town, and I couldn’t have been more proud.
It was, as usual, a joy to be at KGB Bar. Most of my life, I’ve been a part of the audience, but on this Saturday night, I was one of the two readers (the other being Wendy Lee). The wonderful folks at Debut Lit put the great event together, and Alexander Chee was kind enough to come all the way from Amherst to introduce both Wendy and myself. Good books, good liquor. Life is good.
Two posts from the good folks at the Page 69 Test and EWN. In case you don’t know what the Page 69 test is:
Marshall McLuhan, the guru of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), recommends that the browser turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book. It works. Rule One, then: browse powerfully and read page 69. [Campaign for the American Reader]
The thing I was most afraid of was this: that my page 69 would be blank. Lucky for me, it’s page 70 that’s got nothing on it.
Page 69 is a short one, with just a single paragraph, but it serves a crucial purpose: a transition point to bring the reader back to the central characters of the novel, the Kims.
Tuesday should see piles of Sung J. Woo’s debut novel, Everything Asian Woo (2009, Thomas Dunne Books), in bookstores as it hits its publishing date. I’ve not read the whole thing yet, but can say that I’m about 1/3 of the way through and enjoying it enough to be pretty sure I’ll have it finished up before that pub date hits.
This past weekend, I drove up and down the the state of New Jersey, hitting as many indie bookstores as I could, and some cafes as well. That’s because I was trying to distribute a broadsheet of the first chapter of the book that I had made. (By the way, I need to thank Todd Dills of the2ndhand.com for not only giving me the initial idea to do this, but also for his help on figuring out what kind of paper to use. And again, big thanks to Noah Dempewolf for his killer illustrations and design.)
On the first day, I drove about 230 miles, arriving at the first store, Books & Greetings, at around 10:30am. After that, I stopped at Womraths, because it was only about five minutes away from Books & Greetings. Then it was to Bookends, which somehow ended up being slightly north of where I was. At this point, I looked at my list of stores to hit, and was slightly disheartened that I still had twelve more to go.
In preparation for the avalanche of media coverage that will be exploding like a volcano (talk about mixing some bad metaphors), I have set up a Google Alert with my name, and lo and behold, I actually got a hit. The article is from my hometown newspaper, the Warren Reporter. It all looks good, except they said my novel came out last month. But hey, press is press, so I’m grateful.
The other bit of news I found today was that an email interview I did a little while ago got in The Korea Daily. It’s been there for about two weeks, so if I hadn’t been so lazy setting up my Google Alert, maybe this would’ve been my first. In any case, for those who want to read the interview in English that I’d originally done with the reporter, check out the exchange below. The Korean version has been shifted around here and there, but it’s basically the same thing.
The contract copies of the book (comp copies that are designated in the contract) arrived yesterday, and this morning, I slid them into the top shelf of my bookcase and took this shot, and I was reminded of one of my favorite jobs growing up.
The year before I left for college, I worked at the Barnes & Noble in Shrewsbury, NJ, which, like so many stores nowadays, isn’t there anymore. Each associate was given a section to take care of, and I ended up with scifi/fantasy, which was great because at that time, I read a lot of it. I hadn’t discovered Philip K. Dick yet, but I was quite fond of folks like Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s series), Isaac Asimov (Foundation series), and Stephen R. Donaldson (Mordant’s Need series). Not only did I have to keep the shelves in order, I also had to keep tabs on what was selling out and had the freedom to display the books however I chose. If there was a title I liked, I faced the cover out, to catch the eyes of the potential customer.
So here’s what I hope, now that I’m standing on the other side — that there’s a book associate out there who likes my book enough to give it the cover treatment.
