No, not the betting kind, but the reading kind. On this wonderful warm New Jersey evening, I was invited to speak at a book club in Neptune. The ladies call themselves the Bookies, and they are voracious and intelligent readers. My deepest thanks to Shelly who put the event together and all the enthusiastic attendees who showed up to listen to me speak about my first novel.
(Photo credit: Dawn, my talented wife!)
Thanks to all those wonderful writers who showed up last night! The conditions may have been unseasonably chilly, but we fired up the evening with great reading and great writing.
On Thursday, 7/25 7pm, I’ll be teaching a memoir workshop at the Bryant Park Reading Room. Details can be found here, and you can register for it here. It’ll be a mixture of lecture and actual writing, so sharpen those pencils!
BooksNJ is happening! Sunday, June 9, from 1pm until 5pm. I’ll be on at 2:20pm until 3pm, for a panel called:
Writing as a Life Long Career: Reinventing Yourself
I’ll be on it with two other writers, Tracey Baptiste and Marion Calabro. If you are in the area, please come on by.
[poster]
Since my Modern Love essay came out on Thursday, a few people have asked about the recently-completed second book. Here’s the pitch.
Love Love
by Sung J. Woo
A novel about art and athletics, family and adoption, remembrance and forgiveness – and Judy and Kevin, sister and brother.
Judy Lee’s life has not turned out the way she’d imagined. She’s divorced, she’s broke, and her dreams of being a painter have fallen by the wayside. Her co-worker Roger might be a member of the Yakuza, but he’s also the only person who’s asked her on a date in the last year.
Meanwhile, Kevin, an ex-professional tennis player, has decided to donate a kidney to their ailing father — until it turns out that he’s not a genetic match. His father reluctantly tells him he was adopted, but the only information Kevin has is a nude picture of his birth mother.
Told in alternating chapters from the points of view of Judy and Kevin, Love Love is a story about two people figuring out how to live, how to love, how to be their best selves amid the chaos of their lives.
I’ll be at the Great Neck Library next Sunday for an Asian-American Authors Roundtable!
Sunday March 17, 2013
2:00PM – 4:00PM
Authors@GNL Asian-American Authors Roundtable
Contact: Jonathan Aubrey 466-8055, ext. 219
jaubrey@greatnecklibrary.org
Authors will discuss their experiences as Asian-American writers. This program will include audience Q&A, book raffles, book signings, and author readings.
An essay I wrote this morning, in reaction to a book review in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.
If you’ve never read Alix Ohlin, you should. She’s one of the good ones out there, and she’s no slouch when it comes to publishing. Two story collections and two novels in seven years – perhaps not an impressive haul for bionic typewriters like Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates, but plenty impressive to me. She may not have won a Pulitzer or a National Book Award yet, but Ohlin is someone I look up to, because she’s just a very solid writer.
So I was surprised when I read a review of her new novel (Inside) and collection (Signs and Wonders) on Friday in The New York Times Book Review (in print today). Surprised because the review was scathingly negative.
[more]
Last week, the good folks at New York Radio Korea/KRB (1660AM on the dial in the Tri-State area) were kind enough to mention my book on their show. Many thanks to TaeHun Kim, a fellow novelist who serves as a literary critic for KRB, for choosing to highlight my book. The show is in Korean (though with English words and phrases thrown in sporadically!), so this is for Korean-speaking readers. In addition to my novel, soccer and happiness are also discussed!
[listen]
Check out the reviewlet I wrote for the always wonderful and insightful Fiction Writers Review.
This might not seem like a compliment, but it is: Alix Ohlin is a literary torturer.
In her new collection, Signs and Wonders (Vintage), Ohlin (The Missing Person,Babylon and Other Stories) puts her poor people through the wringer, then takes a wrung-out person and puts him under a flattened-human-sized slide for an intense, revelatory microscopic examination. Then she peels off this pancaked person and twists him like toffee, extracting every last drop of his essence onto the page.
[more]
My essay about two excellent novels at The Nervous Breakdown is now up:
More than a month has passed since I listened to the unabridged recording of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and read the paperback of Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s Ms. Hempel Chronicles. To be frank, I’ve been avoiding writing about either of these novels, not because I didn’t like them, but because I feel inadequate even discussing them. My words, no matter how carefully chosen or artfully rendered, cannot elevate these books any further. They are two of the finest works of literature I’ve read in years.
[more]