New York Night at the Festival with Emma Ruby-Sachs, Amy Waldman and Chang-rae Lee

Hosted by Mark Frutkin

Admission

Free

Thursday

Oct , 2011

8:30pm

Eastern

Knox Presbyterian Church

120 Lisgar Street (at Elgin) • Ottawa

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New York Night at the Festival with Emma Ruby-Sachs, Amy Waldman and Chang-rae Lee

Frighteningly plausible and tightly wound.... Waldman addresses with a refreshing frankness thorny moral questions and ethical ironies without resorting to breathless hyperbole.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

We present a taste of New York's literary diversity via three writers who have lived there and whose work is as varied and as multinational as the city itself.

The Water Man’s Daughter, Emma Ruby-Sachs’ acclaimed debut is set in a black township of Johannesburg and marries a page-turning plot with the stories of three women, each of whom is struggling with decisions that will change the course of her life.

The Submission, Amy Waldman’s dazzling debut, re-imagines the aftermath of 9/11. A jury selects a memorial for the victims only to discover that the winner is an American Muslim. Their conflicted response is only a preamble to the coming controversy.

The Surrendered, Chang-rae Lee’s fourth novel, is a spellbinding story of how love and war echo through an entire lifetime. The latest from the internationally acclaimed winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award is a profound meditation on the nature of heroism and sacrifice, the power of love, and the possibilities for mercy, salvation, and surrendering oneself to another.

Chang-rae Lee and Amy Waldman appear with support from the Embassy of the United States of America

The Authors

Amy Waldman

Amy Waldman was co-chief of the South Asia bureau of The New York Times and a national correspondent for The Atlantic. She has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and at the American Academy in Berlin. Her fiction has appeared in the Boston Review and is anthologized in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010. She was born in Los Angeles, studied English at Yale and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Submission is her latest book. Amy Waldman appears with support from the Embassy of the United States of America

Chang-rae Lee

Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, QPB's New Voices Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and the Oregon Book Award. It was also an ALA Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for a PEN West Award, and Lee was named a finalist for Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40 Award. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and numerous anthologies. He lives in New Jersey, and is the director of the MFA program at Hunter College in New York City. THE SURRENDERED With his three critically acclaimed novels, Chang-rae Lee has established himself as one of the most talented writers of contemporary literary fiction. Now, with The Surrendered, Lee has created a book that amplifies everything we've seen in his previous works, and reads like nothing else. It is a brilliant, haunting, heartbreaking story about how love and war inalterably change the lives of those they touch. Chang-rae Lee appears with support from the Embassy of the United States of America

Emma Ruby-Sachs

Her debut novel, The Water Man’s Daughter is a hard-hitting, psychologically intense story of three women whose lives become entwined, and forever changed, after a Canadian water company executive is found dead in a township of Johannesburg, South Africa. It introduces Ruby-Sachs as a fresh and immensely talented new voice in contemporary fiction. Emma Ruby-Sachs’s journalism has been published in The Nation and The Huffington Post. A graduate of Wesleyan University and the University of Toronto law school, Emma lived in South Africa for periods in 2003 and 2004. She currently works with Avaaz, a progressive online organization. Emma lives in Brooklyn. Visit her website at www.emmarubysachs.com.