Gish Jen

Gish Jen discusses and signs Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self “Gish Jen is the Great American Novelist we're always hearing about, and in Tiger Writing she delivers a profound meditation on the divergent roles that storytelling, artmaking, and selfhood take on across the East-West divide. Penetrating, inspired, and, yes, indispensable.” - Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao

Location: Street: 695 E. Colorado Blvd City: Pasadena, Province: California Postal Code: 91101 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes author Gish Jen to the store to celebrate the release of Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Independent Self on Sunday, April 14th at 3pm.For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsiders Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.

Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies to her father s striking account of his childhood in China, this accessible book not only illuminates Jen's own development and celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self, each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world. The novel, Jen 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, the recurrent. In its progress from a moving evocation of one writer's life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have shaped our experience for millennia, Tiger Writing radically shifts the way we understand ourselves and our art-making.

Gish Jen is a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of four novels, including Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land and World and Town.

Location: Street: 5433 College Ave City: Oakland, Province: California Postal Code: 94618-1502 Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)

Bestselling author Gish Jen will be at The Galaxy Bookshop to read from her most recent novel, World and Town. A rural New England town sets the stage for the story of the repercussions of a community's subtle but pervasive distrust of outsiders. That distrust is directed toward both a Cambodian family, new in town, and a long-time resident who becomes unwillingly involved in the newcomers' lives. As blame for unrest in the community is heaped upon the heads of the Cambodian immigrants, tensions rise and tempers flare, leading people on both sides of the matter to take unexpected action.

Gish Jen is the author of three previous novels and a book of stories. Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for fiction and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives with her husband and two children in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Location: Additional: 41 S. Main Street City: Hardwick, Province: Vermont Country: United States (added from IndieBound)… (more)