Gish Jen

discusses

Tiger Writing:
Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self

This event includes a book signing

Date

Mar
27
Wednesday
March 27, 2013
7:00 PM ET

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome award-winning author GISH JEN for a discussion of her new book, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self.

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 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

Gish Jen
Gish Jen

Gish Jen

Gish Jen's fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, and dozens of anthologies and textbooks. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has been the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award as well as a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has also held NEA, Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Radcliffe fellowships; has been awarded honorary doctorates from Emerson College and Williams College; delivered the William E. Massey lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard in 2012; and currently serves on the Board of Directors of the MacArthur Foundation. Her ninth and most recent book is a collection of stories spanning the 50 years since the opening of China to the West. It is entitled Thank You, Mr. Nixon.

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Walking from the Harvard Square T station: 2 minutes

As you exit the station, reverse your direction and walk east along Mass. Ave. in front of the Cambridge Savings Bank. Cross Dunster St. and proceed along Mass. Ave for three more blocks. You will pass Au Bon Pain, JP Licks, and TD Bank. Harvard Book Store is located at the corner of Mass. Ave. and Plympton St.

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FAQ:

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General Info
(617) 661-1515
info@harvard.com

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