Love Love in Booklist Editors’ Choice: Adult Books, 2015

Huge thanks to the lovely folks at Booklist who chose Love Love as one of the titles for this year.  It’s not every day that I get to share a list with Jonathan Franzen, Lauren Groff, and Anne Tyler!  Here’s what they had to say about their picks:

BOL

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The Adult Books editors have selected the following titles as representative of the year’s outstanding books for public library collections. Our scope has been intentionally broad, and we have attempted to find books that combine literary, intellectual, and aesthetic excellence with popular appeal.

And here’s the blurb for mine.

Love Love. By Sung J. Woo. Soft Skull, $15.95 (9781593766177).

Their father’s medical crisis reveals shocking lies and fractures in the lives of siblings Judy Lee, a 38-year-old temp who once dreamed of being an artist, and former tennis pro Kevin in Woo’s sharp, astute, and stunning novel of aging, loss, and disillusion.

Booklist, you made my year.

 

Love Love in San Francisco Magazine (9/2015)

A hearty thank you to San Francisco Magazine for giving some love to Love Love:sanfranmag_ll

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.

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Freedom and Ms. Hempel

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.

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