An Evening With…
GISH JEN
discussing her new novel
The Resisters
Wednesday, February 26, 8pm
Books & Books, Coral Gables
“The Resisters is palpably loving, smart, funny, and desperately unsettling. The novel should be required reading for the country both as a cautionary tale and because it is a stone-cold masterpiece. This is Gish Jen’s moment. She has pitched a perfect game.” —Ann Patchett
The time: not so long from now. The place: AutoAmerica. The land: half under water. The Internet: one part artificial intelligence, one part surveillance technology, and oddly human–even funny. The people: Divided. The angel-fair “Netted” have jobs, and literally occupy the high ground. The copper-toned “Surplus” live on swampland if they’re lucky, on water if they’re not.The story: To a Surplus couple–he once a professor, she still a lawyer–is born a Blasian girl with a golden arm.
The Resisters (Knopf, $26.95) is the story of one family struggling to maintain its humanity and normalcy in circumstances that threaten their every value–as well as their very existence. Extraordinary and ordinary, charming and electrifying, this is Gish Jen at her most irresistible.
GISH JEN is the author of four previous novels, a story collection, and two works of nonfiction, the latest of which was The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap. Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for fiction and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, her work was featured in a PBS American Masters’ special on the American novel and is widely taught.
Jen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has been awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship, and a Mildred and Harold Strauss Living; she has also delivered the William E. Massey, Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard University.