Historic LoDo: Acclaimed writer Gish Jen, who has been nominated for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award and featured in a
PBS American Masters program on the American Novel, is the author of the three novels Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, and World and Town. She will join us to read from and sign her new book Tiger Writing: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self (Harvard University Press). Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies
to her father s striking account of his childhood in China, this
accessible book not only illuminates Jen s own development and
celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the
independent and interdependent self each mode of selfhood yielding a
distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world. The
novel, Jen writes, is fundamentally a Western form  that values
originality, authenticity, and the truth of individual experience. By
contrast, Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity,
the everyday, the recurrent. In its progress from a moving evocation of
one writer s life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have
shaped our experience for millennia, Tiger Writing radically shifts
the way we understand ourselves and our art-making. “Blending family memoir, cultural criticism, and reflections on her own life as a writer, Gish Jen makes a compelling case for the novel as a meeting-ground of typically American themes of independence with classically Asian ideals of interdependence. Tiger Writing is a rare case of a book on writing that itself is a joy to read.” —David Damrosch, author of What Is World Literature?
 Can’t make it to the signing? Request an autographed copy here: books@tatteredcover.com Gish Jen’s website
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