Join us at Buffalo Street Books in downtown Ithaca Thursday, October 13 at 5:00pm for a reading with 2018 alums Lisa Hsiao Chen and Ravi Mangla as they celebrate the publications of their new books: Activities of Daily Living, and The Observant, respectively.
This event is free, open to the public, and accessible. Buffalo Street Books is located in the Dewitt Mall at 215 N. Cayuga, although its main (accessible) entrance is on Buffalo Street. Books will be available for purchase and signing.
About the authors and books:
Lisa Hsiao Chen is the author of Activities of Daily Living (W.W. Norton) and Mouth (Kaya Press), which won a writing award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She has received a Writers’ Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, a Center for Fiction fellowship and was a resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. Born in Taipei, she now lives in New York City.
From the publisher:
A lucid and moving debut novel on the interconnection between work and life, loneliness and kinship, and the projects that occupy our time.
How do we take stock of a life—by what means, and by what measure? This is the question that preoccupies Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late thirties. In the off-hours from her day job, Alice struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental, yearlong 1980s performance pieces. As Alice roots deeper into Hsieh’s radical use of time and his mysterious disappearance from the art world, her project starts metabolizing events from her own life. She wanders from subway rides to street protests, loses touch with a friend, and becomes a caretaker for her stepfather, a Vietnam vet whose dream of making traditional Chinese furniture dissolved in alcoholism and dementia.
Moving between present-day and 1980s New York City, with detours to Silicon Valley and the Venice Biennale, Activities of Daily Living is a startlingly precise, vivid, and tender examination of the passage of time.
“From the making of art to the making of families, Lisa Hsiao Chen makes us realize the great beauty and courage found in everyday acts of care, work, endurance, and survival. Weaving between one daughter and her father, one artist and his work, Activities of Daily Living becomes a beguiling and brilliant meditation on what it means to live and die.” — Viet Thanh Nguygen, Pulitizer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed
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Ravi Mangla is the author of The Observant (Spuyten Duyvil) and Understudies (Outpost19). His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Jacobin, The Kenyon Review, Cincinnati Review, Mid-American Review, Salon, The Paris Review Daily, Quarterly West, American Short Fiction, Tin House Online, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Rochester, NY.
From the publisher:
In a distant country, recently imprisoned filmmaker Vasant Rai is offered a chance at freedom. But the choice, he learns, offers itself at a very steep price. Ravi Mangla’s The Observant is a sharp-eyed literary thriller about freedom of expression under tyrannical regimes, authority and its adherents, and the demands of survival.
“Short and powerful, Ravi Mangla’s The Observant begs to be read in one sitting, but I read it slowly, piece-by-piece, marveling at the book’s layered and emotional turns. It really is a masterful work.” – Rion Amilcar Scott (author of The World Doesn’t Require You)