Go out and buy this book immediately! Lee is the best writer of the complexities of the contemporary Asian American experience, if there is such a category. His writing is smart, fast-paced, and sophisticated.
Book Description of
Wrack and Ruin
From his website www.don-lee.com
An incisive satire about art and commerce, fame and ethnicity, nature and
development, and two estranged brothers, Lyndon and Woody Song.
Lyndon Song is a renowned sculptor who fled New York City
to become a Brussels sprouts farmer in the small California town of Rosarita
Bay. Lyndon has a brother, Woody, an indicted financier turned movie producer,
and Woody has a plan, involving a golf-course resort on Lyndon’s land and an
aging kung-fu diva from Hong Kong with a mean kick and a meaner drinking
problem.
Over one madcap Labor Day weekend, this plan wreaks havoc
on Lyndon’s bucolic and carefully managed life. Woody’s financial (and
existential) crisis embroils everyone from a developer obsessed with college
football to two field biologists studying western snowy plovers, and
culminates in literature’s first-ever windsurfing chase scene. Meanwhile,
Lyndon’s great love, Sheila Lemke, the impulsive mayor of Rosarita Bay, is
having a crisis of her own, leading her to petty vandalism; other women smell
mysteriously of chocolate ice cream; Buddhist missives arrive scrawled on
paper airplanes; and a small plot of exceptionally lush marijuana is ready for
harvest. In all, Lyndon’s life in Rosarita Bay is ready to come apart at the
seams.
Hilarious and philosophical, this many-hued novel about
the landscape of contemporary “multicultural” America is critically acclaimed
Don Lee’s best book yet.
Don
Lee is the author of the novel Country
of Origin, which won an American Book Award, the Edgar Award for Best First
Novel, and a Mixed Media Watch Image
Award for Outstanding
Fiction, and the story collection Yellow, which won the Sue
Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
and the Members Choice Award from the Asian American Writers' Workshop. A new novel,
Wrack and Ruin, will be
published by W.W. Norton in April 2008.
In November 2007, he received the inaugural
Fred R. Brown Literary Award for emerging novelists from the
University of Pittsburgh's
creative
writing program.
He has received an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize, and his stories have
been published in The Kenyon Review, GQ, New England Review,
The North American Review, The Gettysburg Review, Bamboo Ridge, Manoa, American Short Fiction, Glimmer
Train, Charlie Chan Is Dead 2, Screaming Monkeys, Narrative, and
elsewhere. His book reviews and essays have appeared in The Boston Globe,
Harvard Review, Agni, Boston magazine, The Village Voice, and other
magazines. He has received fellowships from the Massachusetts
Cultural Council and the St. Botolph Club Foundation.
He currently lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota. From 1988 to 2007, he was the editor of the literary journal Ploughshares.
In the fall of 2007, he began teaching creative writing as an associate
professor at Macalester College.
He is a third-generation Korean American. The son of a career State Department
officer, he spent the majority of his childhood in Tokyo and Seoul. In
Tokyo, he attended ASIJ—the American School in Japan. He received his B.A. in
English literature from UCLA and his M.F.A. in creative writing and literature
from Emerson College. After graduating, he taught fiction writing workshops at
Emerson for four years as an adjunct instructor, then began working full-time
at Ploughshares.
He was an occasional writer-in-residence in Emerson's M.F.A.
program and a visiting writer at other colleges and universities.
His hobbies are windsurfing and bicycling.
