www.milibrary.org
Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self - Author Gish Jen in conversation with poet Maxine Hong Kingston
Co-sponsored by Asia Society
Tiger Writing is a lively blend of family history, cultural criticism, and meditations on Gish Jen’s life as the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, reflecting on Eastern and Western ideas of self and how they intersect. The novel, she writes, is fundamentally a Western form that values originality, authenticity, and the truth of individual experience. By contrast, Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, and the recurrent. This new book which is a culmination of her Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard, celebrates the writer’s process of self examination and creation.
Reservations required. Reserve your spot by ordering below or calling (415) 393-0100.
Gish Jen is author of the award-winning novels Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, and World and Town, and the short story collection Who’s Irish? She has also written for publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the New Republic. Her short work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike.
The recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment for the Arts, she was awarded a Lannan Literary Award in Fiction in 1999 as well as a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living in 2003. The latter is a five-year award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. Jen was also nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award and featured in a PBS American Masters program on the American Novel. In 2012 she delivered the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University in 2012. These lectures culminated in Tiger Writing published by Harvard University Press this Spring.
Maxine Hong Kingston shares the honor of presenting at the Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard. In 2002, these lectures were published in To Be The Poet.She is currently Senior Lecturer Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. The Woman Warrior, her first book, was published in 1976 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her second book, China Men, earned the National Book Award. Her recent books include a collection of essays, Hawai‘i One Summer and a novel, The Fifth Book of Peace. Her free verse memoir, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life isan eloquent homage to aging.
Location: 4th Floor Meeting Room