CHANGRAELEE

Rutgers welcomes award-winning novelist Chang-rae Lee for a reading and book signing on Wednesday, September 19 in the Rutgers Student Center multi-purpose room.
Lee was selected by the New Yorker as one of the twenty best American writers under forty.
A second-generation Korean American, Lee immigrated to the United States with his family when he was 3 years old. He was raised in Westchester, New York, and graduated from Yale University with a degree in English and from the University of Oregon with a MFA in writing. He worked as a Wall Street analyst for a year before turning to writing full time. His first novel, Native Speaker (1995), won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the American Book Award and explores the life of a Korean-American outsider who is involved in espionage. In 1999, he published his second novel, A Gesture Life, which elaborated on his themes of identity and assimilation through the narrative of an elderly physician who remembers treating Korean "comfort women" during World War II. A Gesture Life was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and received rave reviews. Currently, he serves as the director of the MFA program at Hunter College in New York City.

"Lee elegantly creates suspense out of the seemingly static story of a man trying hard not to feel. He has written a wise and humane novel that both amplifies the themes of identity and exile he addressed in Native Speaker, and creates a wonderfully resonant portrait of a man caught between two cultures and two lives."
-Michiko Kakutani on A Gesture Life (The New York Times)