<< Previous

Tuesday, May 13th

Houghton Mifflin

Price: $24.00

Random House

Price: $14.00

PREETA SAMARASAN and V. V. GANESHANANTHAN read from their debut novels

 

Evening Is the Whole Day

 

and Love Marriage

A conversation on political identity in literature will follow.

Harvard Book Store and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government are pleased to welcome award-winning writer PREETA SAMARASAN and Atlantic Monthly and Wall Street Journal contributor V. V. GANESHANANTHAN to read from their debut novels, followed by a conversation about political identity in literature.

In Preeta Samarasan's Evening Is the Whole Day, when the family's rubber-plantation servant girl is dismissed for unnamed crimes, it is only the latest in a series of precipitous losses that have shaken six-year-old Aasha's life. In the space of several weeks, her grandmother died under mysterious circumstances and her older sister, Uma, left for Columbia University, gone forever. Circling through years of family history to arrive at the moment of Uma's departure—stranding her worshipful younger sister in a family, and a country, slowly going to pieces—Evening Is the Whole Day illuminates one Indian immigrant family's layers of secrets and lies, while exposing the complex underbelly of Malaysia itself. 

V. V. Ganeshananthan tells the story of how Yalini, the daughter of Sri Lankan immigrants who left their collapsing country and married in America, finds herself caught between the history of her ancestors and her own modern world. But when she is summoned to Toronto to help care for her dying uncle, Kumaran, a former member of the militant Tamil Tigers, she is forced to see that violence is not a relic of the Sri Lankan past, but very much a part of her Western present. While Kumaran's loved ones gather around him to say goodbye, Yalini traces her family's roots—and the conflicts facing them as ethnic Tamils—through a series of marriages. Now, as Kumaran's death and his daughter's politically motivated nuptials edge closer, in the tradition of her family, Yalini too must decide where she stands.

CONTACT:

General Info:
617.661.1515

Media:
617.661.1424 ex.1

Email:

Preeta Samarasan was born in Malaysia and moved to the United States to finish high school at the United World College U.S.A, and attend Hamilton College.  She was enrolled in a Ph.D. program in musicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, and had begun work on a dissertation on Gypsy music festivals in France when she left to complete her novel.  She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, where an earlier version of Evening Is the Whole Day won the Avery and Jule Hopwood Novel Award.  She also recently won the Asian American Writer's Workshop short-story award. Her short fiction and nonfiction has been published or is forthcoming in Hyphen, the Michigan Quarterly Review, EGO Magazine, A Public Space, and in the anthology Urban Odysseys: KL Stories. She currently lives in central France.

Vasugi V. Ganeshananthan, a fiction writer and journalist, lives in New York. She is a 2002 graduate of Harvard College. In 2005, she received an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and in 2005-2006, she was the Bennett Fellow and writer-in-residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. In 2007, she graduated from the new MA program at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she was a Bollinger Fellow specializing in Arts & Culture journalism. She has written and reported for The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Sepia Mutiny, and The American Prospect, among others. She is the vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association and a member of the graduate board of The Harvard Crimson. This fall, she will be a writer-in-residence at Skidmore College.

Photo credit: Preston Merchant