Chang-rae Lee + Gary Shteyngart: A Tender Age
About this Event
Moderating the conversation is best-selling author Gary Shteyngart. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.
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ACCESSIBILITY:
Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator. Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.
ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by July 22 to request.
For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected].
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Guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence.
A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.
Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life.
Photo credit: Michelle Lee
Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, as well as My Year Abroad, On Such a Full Sea, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A 2021 winner of the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.
Photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe
Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His essays appear regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times and have been featured in nine Best American anthologies. He is the author of six bestselling novels including The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Super Sad True Love Story, Our Country Friends, and Vera, or Faith. His books have won several awards including the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature, the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction, the National Jewish Book Award, and have been published in thirty countries. His memoir, Little Failure, was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in New York with his wife, son, and dog.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 13.61 to USD 36.83
