Finding a Way: Readings from Three Novels

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes received her BA in Literary Arts from Brown University, her MFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia. Her debut novel, The Sleeping World (Simon & Schuster) is set in 1970s post-Franco Spain. Mosca is an intelligent, disillusioned university student, whose younger brother is among the “disappeared,” and now presumed dead. Mosca and her friends commit an act that carries their rebellion too far and sends them spiraling out of their provincial hometown. But the further they go, the more Mosca believes her brother is alive and the more she is willing to do to find him.

Born and raised in Singapore, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York–based journalist and author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, and edited the fiction anthology Singapore Noir. She has been a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, InStyle magazine, and the Baltimore Sun. Her book, Sarong Party Girls: A Novel (William Morrow) is about a young woman’s rise in the glitzy, moneyed city of Singapore, where old traditions clash with heady modern materialism. On the edge of twenty-seven, Jazzy hatches a plan for her and her best girlfriends. Before the year is out, these Sarong Party Girls will all have spectacular weddings to rich ang moh—Western expat—husbands, with Chanel babies (the cutest status symbols of all) quickly to follow. As she fervently pursues her quest to find a white husband, this bombastic yet tenderly vulnerable gold-digger reveals the contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore’s glamorous nightclubs and busy streets, its grubby wet markets and seedy hawker centers. Desperate to move up in Asia’s financial and international capital, will Jazzy and her friends succeed?

Montague Kobbé was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and has resided in the UK, Germany, and Spain. He has had close ties to Anguilla for over thirty years and maintains a regular literary column in Sint Maarten’s Daily Herald. His work has been published in the New York Times and El Nacional (Venezuela) among many other media outlets. He is the author of The Night of the Rambler (a finalist for the Premio Literario Casa de las Américas) and Tales of Bed Sheets and Departure Lounges. On the Way Back (Akashik) is his latest novel. hilarious social novel centers on a comically failed business venture on the island of Anguilla. Montague Kobbé es un autor alemán, nacido en Caracas. Su primera novela, The Night of the Rambler (Akashic, 2013) obtuvo una mención del Premio Casa de las Américas 2014. Después de publicar On the Way Back (Akashic, 2016), lanza la colección de microrrelatos Historias de camas y aeropuertos, una obra bilingüe en inglés y español. Ha coeditado Crude Words, una colección de textos por treinta autores venezolanos traducidos al inglés.