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In Maureen Sun’s novel Sisters K, after years of estrangement, Minah, Sarah, and Esther have been forced together again. Called to their father’s deathbed, the sisters must confront a man little changed by the fact of his mortality. Eugene Kim, vicious and pathetic in equal measure, wants one thing: to see which of his children will abject themselves for his favor—and more importantly, his fortune.From their childhood in California to the depths of a mid-Atlantic winter, the solitary sisters Kim must face a brutal past colliding with their present. Grasping at their broken bonds of sisterhood, they will do what is necessary to escape the tragedy of their circumstances—whatever the cost. For Minah, the eldest, the money would be recompense for their father’s cruelty. A practicing lawyer with an icy pragmatism, she dreams of a family of her own and sets to work on securing her inheritance. For Sarah, a gifted and embittered academic who wields her intelligence like a weapon, confronting her father again forces her to reckon with the desperation of her present life. It is left to the youngest—directionless and loving Esther—to care for their father in her lonely quest to do right by everyone. For Esther, a fortune pales in comparison to the prospect of finally reuniting with her sisters. With a legacy of violence haunting their lives, the sisters dare to imagine a better future even as their father’s poison courses through their blood.
Sprawling yet urgent, meditative yet lucid, the poems in Jennifer Chang’s third collection, An Authentic Life, offer a bold examination of a world deeply influenced by war and patriarchy. In dialogues against literature, against philosophy, and against God, Chang interrogates the “fathers” who stand at the center of history. These poems navigate wounds opened by exploration of family and generational trauma and draw on the author’s experiences as a mother, as the daughter of immigrants, and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation.
Maureen Sun has taught literature at Princeton, Barnard, NYU, and the University of Hong Kong. She is at work on a second novel. Her work has been recognized in The Best American Essays 2021. Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, which received the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Believer, Best American Poetry 2012 and 2022, Georgia Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, A Public Space, and Yale Review. Her essays on poetry and poetics, race, and culture have appeared in Blackwell’s Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Margins, New Literary History, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, and The Volta. She is the poetry editor of New England Review and teaches at the University of Texas in Austin.
This event is cosponsored by Labyrinth Books and The Princeton Public Library.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Labyrinth Books Princeton, 122 Nassau St,Princeton,NJ,United States
