Bruce Holsinger & Lan Samantha Chang: A Conversation

Bruce Holsinger is the author of The Gifted School, which won the Colorado Book Award. He teaches at the University of Virginia and is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. To all appearances, the Larsen-Hall family has everything: healthy children, a stable marriage, a lucrative career for Brantley, and the means for Daphne to pursue her art full-time. But in The Displacements: A Novel (Riverhead Books), their deluxe Miami life has just clicked into place when Luna – the world’s first Category 6 hurricane – upends everything they have taken for granted. When the storm makes landfall, it triggers a descent of another sort for the family. Their home is destroyed, two members are missing, and their finances are abruptly cut off. They find themselves swept into a mass rush of evacuees from across the American South, transported hundreds of miles to a FEMA megashelter. Their new community includes an insurance agent-turned-drug dealer, a group of vulnerable children, and a dedicated relief worker trying to keep the peace. The Displacements explores what happens when privilege is lost and resilience is tested in a swiftly changing world.

Lan Samantha Chang is the author of the collection Hunger and the novels Inheritance and All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost. Her short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short Stories. Chang is the first Asian American and the first female director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In The Family Chao: A Novel (W. W. Norton & Company), for 35 years the residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have enjoyed dining on the Fine Chao restaurant’s Americanized Chinese food, happy to shrug off unsavory whispers about the family owners: Big Leo Chao; his wife, Winnie; and their three sons, who have earned scholarships at good colleges. But when the brothers reunite in Haven, the Chao family’s secrets and simmering resentments erupt. Soon, patriarch Leo is found dead – presumed murdered – and his sons draw the gaze of the town. The ensuing trial brings to light potential motives for all three brothers, and as the spotlight on them tightens, they must reckon with the legacy of their father’s outsized appetites and their future survival.