Fiction of Place: A Reading

Jennifer Tseng’s first book The Man With My Face won the 2005 Asian American Writers' Workshop's National Poetry Manuscript Competition and a 2006 PEN American Center Open Book Award. Her second book Red Flower, White Flower, won the Marick Press Poetry Prize. She works at the West Tisbury Library on Martha’s Vineyard. Her debut novel is Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (Europa Editions). Books may be Mayumi Saito’s greatest love and her one source of true pleasure. Forty-one years old, disenchanted wife and dutiful mother, Mayumi’s work as a librarian on a small island off the coast of New England feeds her passion for reading and provides her with many occasions for wry observations on human nature, but it does little to remedy the mundanity of her days. That is, until the day she issues a library card to a shy seventeen-year-old boy and swiftly succumbs to a sexual obsession that subverts the way she sees the library, her family, the island she lives on, and ultimately herself.

Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez is the author of Algún día te cuento las cosas que he visto and Luego el silencio. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of New Mexico. His most recent collection is One Day I'll Tell You the Things I've Seen: Stories (University of New Mexico Press). The stories in Vaquera-Vásquez's intimate conversational narrative take readers around the world, from the orchards of California to the cornfields of Iowa, from the neighborhoods of Madrid and Mexico City to the Asian shore of Istanbul. As the characters navigate borders and border crossings--both physical and psychological--they attempt to make sense of their increasingly complex memories and relationships.

Thrity Umrigar is the author of five other novels—The World We Found, The Weight of Heaven, The Space Between Us, If Today Be Sweet, and Bombay Time—and the memoir First Darling of the Morning. An award-winning journalist, she has been a contributor to the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Huffington Post, among other publications. She is the the Armington Professor of English at Case-Western Reserve University. In her latest novel, The Story Hour (Harper), an experienced psychologist, Maggie carefully maintains emotional distance from her patients. But when she meets a young Indian woman named Lakshmi, who tried to kill herself, her professional detachment disintegrates. Determined to empower Lakshmi as a woman who feels valued in her own right, Maggie abandons protocol, and soon doctor and patient have become close friends. But while their relationship is deeply affectionate, it is also warped by conflicting expectations. When Maggie and Lakshmi open up and share long-buried secrets, the revelations will jeopardize their close bond, shake their faith in each other, and force them to confront painful choices.