Chang-rae Lee with Elaine Castillo

Chang-rae Lee, the acclaimed author of Native Speaker, returns to Kepler’s to talk about his coming-of-age novel, A Tender Age. 

About the Book

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.

About the Speakers

Chang-rae Lee is the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, and 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, Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.

Named one of “30 of the Planet’s Most Exciting Young People” by the Financial Times, Elaine Castillo was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her most recent novel, Moderation, has been longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize in Fiction, and was named one of the Top Ten Books of 2025 by The Atlantic, Slate, and a Best Book of 2025 by The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, and more. She is also the author of the award-winning debut novel America is Not the Heart and the acclaimed book of essays How to Read Now. She is the recipient of a 2026 Whiting Award, a two-time San Francisco Public Library Laureate, a Berkeley Public Library Laureate, and was also recently longlisted for the 2026 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. In the tradition of diasporic mothers everywhere, she works primarily so her rescue German shepherd, Vincent, can live a better life.

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Host or Publisher Kepler's Literary Foundation - Youth