The Story Behind the Pick: The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee
Chang-rae Lee has a history of writing award-winning fiction: Native Speaker (1995) won the PEN/Hemingway Award in 1996; A Gesture Life (1999) won the ALA Notable Books in 2000; and Aloft (2004) was a Book Sense Book of the Year nominee in 2005.
Certainly Lee’s personal history also makes him a remarkable addition to our First Edition Club. Born in Seoul, Korea, Lee immigrated with his parents to the United States at the age of three. While his father was on the road to become a psychiatrist, his mother struggled to transfer the vibrant life she had in Korea to her new American home. There is no doubt a young Lee witnessed his parents navigating a new culture and language according to the best of their own abilities. Lee became the writer who happens to have the heart-felt experience of navigating multiple cultures. He remarks on his personal page at Princeton University: “I’m fascinated by people who find themselves in positions of alienation or some kind of cultural dissonance. The characters may not always be Asian Americans, but they will always be people who are thinking about the culture and how they fit or don’t fit into it.”
Perhaps even more importantly, there are those writers you want to read no matter what they are writing about. Chang-rae Lee is one of them.
Lee talks about The Surrendered in an interview on The Leonard Lopate Show on WYNC radio.
Read this: Lisa attempts to capture the lovely buzz at Chang-rae’s reading at Lemuria Books on March 22, 2010.
First Editions Club: January 2010
First Editions Club: February 2010
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