Author Talk with Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes and Patricia Park
Writers Patricia Park and Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes will read from their acclaimed debut novels. Q&A to follow!
The Sleeping World:
Spain, 1977. Military rule is over. Bootleg punk music oozes out of illegal basement bars, uprisings spread across towns, fascists fight anarchists for political control, and students perform protest art in the city center, rioting against the old government, the undecided new order, against the universities, against themselves…
Mosca is an intelligent, disillusioned university student, whose younger brother is among the “disappeared,” taken by the police two years ago, now presumed dead. Spurred by the turmoil around them, Mosca and her friends commit an act that carries their rebellion too far and sends them spiraling out of their provincial hometown. But the further they go, the more Mosca believes her brother is alive and the more she is willing to do to find him.
The Sleeping World is a beautiful, daring novel about youth, freedom, and doing whatever it takes to keep a family together, in a nation whose dead walk the streets and whose wars never end.
About the Author:
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is a writer and teacher. She is the author of The Sleeping World. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, the Millay Colony, and the Blue Mountain Center and was a Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Fiction at Bread Loaf. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in One Story, Cosmonauts Avenue, Slice, Pank, The Collagist, NANO Fiction, The Georgia Review, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. Her story “The Elephant’s Foot” was a Distinguished Story in Best American Short Stories 2016.
Re Jane:
For Jane Re, half-Korean, half-American orphan, Flushing, Queens, is the place she’s been trying to escape from her whole life. Sardonic yet vulnerable, Jane toils, unappreciated, in her strict uncle’s grocery store and politely observes the traditional principle of nunchi (a combination of good manners, hierarchy, and obligation). Desperate for a new life, she’s thrilled to become the au pair for the Mazer-Farleys, two Brooklyn English professors and their adopted Chinese daughter. Inducted into the world of organic food co-ops and nineteenth–century novels, Jane is the recipient of Beth Mazer’s feminist lectures and Ed Farley’s very male attention. But when a family death interrupts Jane and Ed’s blossoming affair, she flies off to Seoul, leaving New York far behind.
Journeying from Queens to Brooklyn to Seoul, and back, this is a fresh, contemporary retelling of Jane Eyre and a poignant Korean American debut.
About the Author:
Patricia Park is the author of the novel Re Jane (Viking, 2015), a Korean-American reimagining of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, named Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review and Best Books of 2015 by the American Library Association. She has written for The New York Times, Guardian, Salon, and others. She is Assistant Professor in the MFA program at American University.