Join us for a reading and conversation with Rachel DeWoskin author of Repeat After Me. DeWoskin is a writer who has been lauded for her "razor-sharp descriptions" (The Wall Street Journal) and her "considerable cultural and linguistic resources" (The New Yorker). Her new novel is about modern China and one American woman’s struggle to find herself there.
In a love story that spans decades and continents, from the Tiananmen Square incident to 9/11, from New York City’s Upper West Side to the terraced mountains of South China, Repeat After Me gives readers an alternately funny and painful glimpse of life and loss in between languages.
"In her mesmerizing first novel, Rachel DeWoskin tells a poignant story of love, deception and forgiveness that draws you in with characters as tough and passionate as the cities they inhabit, New York and Beijing. Written with rare sensitivity and splendid wit, Repeat After Me ponders the complexity of relationships within and across cultures in ways both moving and revealing." — Philip P. Pan, author of Out of Mao’s Shadow
This event is free and open to the public. For more information, call 773.769.9299.
More about Rachel DeWoskin
Rachel DeWoskin is the author of the forthcoming novel Repeat After Me (Overlook Press, May 2009) and a memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing (W.W. Norton, 2005), which has been published in six countries and is being developed as a feature film by Paramount Pictures. Rachel holds a BA from Columbia University in English and an MA from Boston University in poetry. She has published poems in magazines including Ploughshares, Seneca Review, The New Delta Review, New Orleans Review, Nerve Magazine, New Orleans Review and The Helen Burns Poetry Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets. She is a regular contributor to the Sunday Times Magazine of London, and has written non-fiction for Conde Nast Traveler, Departures, Teachers & Writers Magazine and anthologies including Found Magazine‘s forthcoming Reqium for a Paper Bag and Wanderlust (Thundersmouth Press, 2006) Her awards include an American Academy of Poets Award and a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference Fellowship. She is a Poetry Editor at Agni Magazine, and an artist in residence at Teachers & Writers. She teaches creative writing at New York University.
Early Praise for Repeat After Me
"A tender story of manic love and loss, this is a heartbreaking and uplifting novel with memorably off-kilter leads."-Publishers Weekly
"This complex story of friendship, family, honor, and cultural differences is rich and deep. DeWoskin (Foreign Babes in Beijing) has firsthand knowledge of China, its language, and its traditions, as well as life in New York City, and her characters live and breathe."-Library Journal
"Thrilling, surprising, funny and moving narrative, characters I care about and cannot predict – Repeat After Me has everything I want in a novel. Rachel DeWoskin’s clear-eyed, cunning imagination has proceeded from the engaging nonfiction Foreign Babes in Beijing to create a memorable work of art, again including the exchanges and collisions between different cultural realities." – Robert Pinsky, three-time poet laureate and author of Gulf Music
"Rachel DeWoskin is that rarest of things; a real writer. She is musical and smart, serious and fun, modern and timeless. "Repeat after me" is a masterwork — a hilarious, sad, page-turning masterwork." – Darin Strauss, best-selling author of Chang and Eng and More Than it Hurts You
This event is co-sponsored by Women and Children First Bookstore and The Public Square.
For more information, call 773.769.9299.