I’m grateful for the September/October 2015 issue of Cornell Magazine, which highlighted Love Love in the Authors section.
You can also read about the other exciting books that my fellow Cornellians wrote here. Right above my novel is Lawrence H. Levy’s Second Street Station — I’ll be on a panel with him at the Cornell Club of Los Angeles’s event on 9/19.
Last night, the Texas Book Festival announced their lineup of writers. That list includes such literary luminaries as Margaret Atwood, Taye Diggs, Nick Flynn, Linda Gray, Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket), Gary Hart, Luis Alberto Urerra, Margo Jefferson, Attica Locke, Marie Lu, Chuck Palahniuk, Tavi Gevinson, and Adrian Tomine.
It also includes me! I can’t wait to get to Austin. This is the 20th anniversary of the festival — it’ll run October 17-18, in Austin, TX, the coolest city in Texas (come on, we all know it’s true). I’ve been a fan of Chuck Palahniuk and Adrian Tomine forever. Elizabeth Strout’s gonna be there, too. The biggest challenge will be fitting all the books in my suitcase for all these authors to sign. Oh, and Wendell Pierce (“Bunk” from The Wire) will also make a showing.
The lovely folks at KoreAm Journal have reviewed Love Love, and it’s an incisive piece. Thank you, KoreAm.
Below is the first essay I ever wrote for KoreAm Journal, dating all the way back to March 2008. On the cover were Harold and Kumar, John Cho and Kal Penn, from their second movie.
I’m not mentioning this just for nostalgia’s sake — it’s because I just heard from the editor-in-chief that the magazine and the website has changed owners and is now facing an uncertain future. As of now, August/September 2015 is the final issue. I sure hope this is not the case — that they will find a way to keep going, but we all know how tough it is to run a magazine nowadays. I wish the editors and writers the best of luck. I’d like to especially thank Suevon Lee and Julie Ha, who polished my prose and shepherded my columns every step of the way.
credit: Jennifer Heuer
My August/September column for KoreAm Journal is now available online. This one has to do with my second novel, Love Love, and how/why I ended up writing about pornography.
From time to time, at a slightly greater frequency than a visit by Halley’s Comet, people ask me what my second novel, Love Love, is about. I usually tell them it stars Korean American siblings in pre-midlife crisis mode. I also mention tennis, since the brother is an ex-professional tennis player. Then I say, hey, it’s about art, too, because the sister is a struggling painter.
At this point the person nods and waits because I’m not done.
“I also wrote about pornography,” I say. Although I mean to mention this without any added inflection or emotion, I usually find that my voice betrays me, so I end up with, “I also wrote about pornography?” Almost as if I’m asking for permission.
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The graphic you see above was one of the alternate covers that the brilliant artist, Jennifer Heuer, came up with. Kinda goes well with the post…
A hearty thank you to San Francisco Magazine for giving some love to Love Love:
The full text:
Get lost in an oversexed San Francisco
Sung J. Woo, author of the highly lauded Everything Asian, has a new novel on a slightly different subject. Love Love (Soft Skull Press) finds 40-year-old tennis coach Kevin Lee grappling with the discovery that not only was he adopted, but his biological parents were porn stars in ’70s San Francisco — a lot to take in for a man in the midst of a midlife crisis.
The portion of the bald head you see below my little snippet belongs to none other than Salman Rushdie! If that wasn’t amazing enough, I’m also sharing space with Jonathan Franzen’s Purity and Billy Joel. The entire page appears below.
The lovely folks at Book Riot’s All the Books! podcast mentioned Love Love in their weekly podcast. It’s about 29 minutes in and lasts about 20 seconds! 🙂 They also mention a whole bunch of other wonderful novels and nonfiction books, so give it a listen via iTunes or directly on their site.
So the second review is now available online, and it’s the best of the bunch. So good that the lovely people at Booklist gave me a starred review.
Woo’s follow-up to his debut, Everything Asian (2009), follows two adult siblings forced to confront their dissatisfaction with their lives. Judy Lee is a 38-year-old temp who has more or less given up on her dreams of being an artist, while her older brother, Kevin, has been teaching tennis at a country club since his professional tennis career came to an end. Their father is dying of renal failure, but Kevin’s plans to donate a kidney to him come to a screeching halt when he learns he is not only not a match for his father, he is not even his biological son. This discovery turns Kevin’s world upside down, sending him on a quest for his birth parents and forcing him to confront his grief over the breakup of his marriage. Judy, who blames her father for the death of her mother, won’t even consider donating a kidney. Woo’s observations about aging, loss, and disillusionment are so smart, so sharp and astute that they’ll haunt readers long after the final page has been turned. That he manages to find the beauty, humor, and even optimism in the struggle makes this glorious, at times painful, but always rewarding novel a stunning achievement. — Kristine Huntley
This title has been recommended for young adult readers:
YA/Mature Readers: Though the Lee siblings are older, their plights–one wrestling with a new love, the other searching for his birth parents–will intrigue sophisticated readers. —Kristine Huntley
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And then to top it off (with sugar), Brenda Janowitz at POPUSGAR picked Love Love as one of the best 2015 Fall Books! Life is great. Thank you, universe.
The good folks at Publishers Weekly reviewed Love Love, and again, I’m relieved and thankful!
Woo’s poignant, engrossing follow up to 2009’s Everything Asian chronicles the lives of two adult siblings—responsible, organized Kevin Lee and his scattered younger sister, Judy—when a medical procedure surprisingly reveals that Kevin was adopted. After seeing how her father treated her dying mother, in addition to a lifetime of his withering disapproval, Judy is indifferent to the fact that her elderly dad now needs a new kidney. Kevin confronts him, then quits his job teaching tennis and goes to San Francisco on a quest to find out more about his birth parents. Both Kevin and Judy have endured recent divorces and miss their former spouses. Judy is attempting a relationship with erstwhile colleague Roger Nakamura, who seems to have a few secrets. After accepting an offer to stay in California with Claudia St. James, the eccentric mother of one of his precocious students, Kevin begins a physical relationship with her. Woo’s narrative takes serendipitous turns—he has a knack for making these twists seem organic, like things that would happen in life. Scenes recounting memories of family and lost love are also skillfully interspersed. (Sept.)
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You may have noticed that this is the third review. What happened to the second one? I skipped it because it isn’t available online yet. But it should be soon…
The life of Riley
by way of Joy and Sadness.
It’s all in her head.
Without question one of the best Pixar movies, if not the best one. The one emotion that I think we could’ve done without is Disgust, but really, that’s the tiniest of complaints. It’s visually arresting, the story moves, and it’s one of these rare movies that may actually help people, too. Only three animated movies have been nominated for Best Picture (Beauty and the Beast, Up, and Toy Story 3) but none have won. Who knows what Oscar bait will come out in November and December, but at the very least, Inside Out deserves to be nominated.
Looks good, sounds right — but
how little we care about
anything, really.
Comparisons to The Big Lebowski are obvious (and The Dude is the far superior movie in all the major ways — humor, plot, acting). After watching the film, I wondered why it didn’t jibe. It felt like the movie thought it was funnier than it actually was (which was very little). The only thing of note is the actress Katherine Waterston, who seemed like she was channeling circa 1995 Laura Linney. Her facial expressions, her movement — she reminded me so much of a young Linney.
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation
She climbs in beauty
up a bruiser, then turns, falls —
a takedown done right.
I don’t think this was as good as the last one, Ghost Protocol, which had more cool gizmos and a higher hit rate for humor (mostly because Jeremy Renner brought the laughs in GP while here, he’s stuck in a suit in DC for too many stretches). But wow, what a performance by Rebecca Ferguson. Give her hair an old-fashioned wave, light her softly, and take some B&W shots, and she’d be a modern-day Lauren Bacall (somebody else agrees, too!). And a big hand to her stunt double, Lucy Cork, who made all those fights look so good. Ferguson’s character was actually more action-oriented than Cruise’s character. How cool is that?
Love Love Book Tour(see the itinerary in Google Maps)
Tuesday, September 15 6pm
Book Passage (with Bucky Sinister)
1 Sausalito, San Francisco ferry Bldg #42
San Francisco, CA 94111
Thursday, September 17 7pm
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd
W. Hollywood, CA 90069
Saturday, September 19
Cornell Club of Los Angeles
private event
Monday, September 21 7pm
Magers & Quinn
3038 Hennepin Ave South
Minneapolis, MN 55408
Thursday, September 24 7pm
The Book Cellar
4736 N. Lincoln Ave
Chicago, IL 60625
Sunday, September 27
BookCourt
The Eagle and the Wren Reading Series
163 Court St
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Wednesday, October 7
Wells College Visiting Writers Series
Wells College
Aurora, NY
Thursday, October 8 5pm
Buffalo Street Books
The Dewitt Mall
215 N Cayuga Street
Ithaca, NY 14850
[and a few more to come…]
