Virtual Event: Christina Chiu and Pam Houston

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes award-winning authors CHRISTINA CHIU and PAM HOUSTON for a discussion of their books Beauty: A Novel and Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country.

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While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $3 contribution to support this author series, our staff, and the future of Harvard Book Store—a locally owned, independently run Cambridge institution. In addition, by purchasing a copy of Beauty and Deep Creek on harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About Beauty: A Novel

Amy Wong is an up-and-coming designer in the New York fashion industry; she is young, beautiful, and has it all. But she finds herself at odds with rival designers in a world rife with chauvinism and prejudice. In her personal life, she struggles with marriage and motherhood, finding that her choices often fall short of her traditional family's expectations. Derailed again and again, Amy must confront her own limitations to succeed as the designer and person she wants to be.

About Deep Creek

On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.

In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief . . . to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”

Praise for Beauty: A Novel

"Beauty is beautiful in the way of a scalpel blade. It's that sharp and precise, that lacerating, that true." —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Hours

“As a young woman and a child of immigrants, Amy Wong discovers that she will do anything to have and to create exquisite things. But after she falls in love with the celebrated and demanding fashion mogul Jeff Jones, marriage and motherhood threaten to snuff out her radiant gifts as a designer. Only Amy’s courage—her brave loyalty to her children, to her talent, and to the ex-husband who has become her dearest friend—leads her to enlightenment and back onto the path she’d pursued all along. In this mesmerizing and unflinching novel, Chiu offers a series of brilliantly curated moments, vivid examinations of the turning points in an extraordinary woman’s life. Chiu fearlessly illuminates how love, integrity, and creativity can shape a world and bring wisdom.” —Lan Samantha Chang, author of Hunger and Inheritance

“In Amy Wong, the protagonist of Beauty, Chiu has created a rapier-sharp heroine who marches into all her messes and triumphs with a wit and bravado that is as seductive as it is astonishing. A fast-paced, sexy novel about growing up, making mistakes and learning from them, written in a defiant, witty prose that is utterly mesmerizing.” —Helen Benedict, author of Wolf Season and Sand Queen

Praise for Deep Creek

“There are few books I have read that remind me how knowing a place, studying a place—the soil and weather and beasts and flora and trails and light at a given time of year, and scent at another, and sounds at another—is one of the ways we heal, one of the ways we de-alienate, one of the ways we return to what we are—the earth; our home. Pam Houston’s Deep Creek is a miracle this way. It reminds us how to get home.” —Ross Gay, author of The Book of Delights

“Deep Creek is a love letter to earth, animals, and the best of humanity. Pam Houston has taken our heartache and woven it back into hope. Her stories of love, loss, and a life lived in relationship to land give us good reasons not to give up on ourselves or each other. This is the book we need right now to remind us how to endure—passionately. An unstoppable heart song.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Misfit’s Manifesto

“Full of wisdom, wit, and loving attention, Pam Houston’s survey of her life and land should be required reading for anyone who loves this planet we call home.” —Camille T. Dungy, author of Guidebook to Relative Strangers