We're thrilled to host bestselling novelist Chang-rae Lee for his latest, My Year Abroad. Mr. Lee will be in conversation with author and reviewer Donna Seaman. This virtual program is free but you must register HERE to reserve your spot. Mr. Lee is a Book Stall favorite and we've been eagerly awaiting for his return since he appeared here for On Such a Full Sea. 

About the Book:

"An extraordinary book, acrobatic on the level of the sentence, symphonic across its many movements--and this is a book that moves...My Year Abroad is a wild ride--a caper, a romance, a bildungsroman, and something of a satire of how to get filthy rich in rising Asia." - Vogue

From the award-winning author of Native Speaker and On Such a Full Sea, an exuberant, provocative story about a young American life transformed by an unusual Asian adventure - and about the human capacities for pleasure, pain, and connection.

Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself.

In the breathtaking, "precise, elliptical prose" that Chang-rae Lee is known for ( The New York Times), the narrative alternates between Tiller's outlandish, mind-boggling year with Pong and the strange, riveting, emotionally complex domestic life that follows it, as Tiller processes what happened to him abroad and what it means for his future. Rich with commentary on Western attitudes, Eastern stereotypes, capitalism, global trade, mental health, parenthood, mentorship, and more, My Year Abroad is also an exploration of the surprising effects of cultural immersion--on a young American in Asia, on a Chinese man in America, and on an unlikely couple hiding out in the suburbs. Tinged at once with humor and darkness, electric with its accumulating surprises and suspense, My Year Abroad is a novel that only Chang-rae Lee could have written, and one that will be read and discussed for years to come.

About the author: Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as On Such a Full Sea, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.

About Donna Seaman: She is the Adult Books Editor for Booklist, a member of the American Writers Museum’s Content Leadership Team, and a recipient of the Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award, the James Friend Memorial Award for Literary Criticism, and the Louis Shores Award for excellence in book reviewing. Her author interviews are collected in Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books, and she is the author of Identity Unknown: Rediscovering Seven American Women Artists.