Words on a wire: Interview with Chang-Rae Lee. Sunday, November 6th, 2011.

Interview with Chang-Rae Lee. Sunday, November 6th, 2011.

6: Daniel interviews friend & writer Chang-Rae Lee, author “Native Speaker” and “The Surrendered.” Find out why he chose a profession as a writer and professor, and why it isn’t pretentious to be emotionally involved in your work.

The Poem of the Week is Denise Levertov’s “In California During the Gulf War,” read by Benjamin Saenz.

And, in this week’s Poetic License, poet Michael Luis Medrano ponders the Second Book Blues.

Chang-rae Lee, the first Korean-American novelist to be published by a major press, focuses on the experiences of first-and second-generation immigrants. His novels explore the nuances of intergenerational relations, the problems of assimilation, and the relationship of culture and memory to identity. While these concerns link him to other contemporary Asian-American writers, Lee's fiction also draws heavily on other influences. Lee experiments with form in his first novel, Native Speaker, which is part detective story, part minimalist chronicle of a failing marriage, reminiscent of John Updike. His prose style has been compared to that of both John Cheever and Kazuo Ishiguro.

(Taken from http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4525/Lee-Chang-rae.html)

1 comment:

UnknownOctober 6, 2015 at 5:16 PM
His "prose style" in Native Speaker is filled with sentence fragments. I wish I could make hundreds of thousands of dollars, win bullshit literary awards and get major publishing house success by writing like a 5 year-old.
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Words on a wire.

Words on a Wire is a radio show about fiction, poetry, the writing community, and whatever other issues concern literary writers and readers of books. Hosted by Benjamin Alire Sáenz and Daniel Chacón.

Originally broadcasted on www.ktep.org

Write to us: soychacon@gmail.com

El Paso, Texas.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz received the American Book Award in 1992 for his first book of poems, Calendar of Dust. A former Wallace Stegner Poetry Fellow at Stanford, he also received a Lannan Poetry Fellowship, a Southwest Book Award, the Paterson Prize, and the Americas Book Award and was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. He is the author of over 10 books, both fiction and poetry. His most recent poetry collection is The Book of What Remains (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). His new YA novel, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is coming out in 2011 from Simon and Schuster. He is the chair of the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Daniel Chacón’s collection of stories, Unending Rooms, was the 2007 winner of the Hudson Prize. He has also been awarded the American Book Award, the Chris Isherwood Foundation Grant, and the Southwest Book Award. His first collection of stories, Chicano Chicanery was a finalist in the Patterson Fiction Prize and his novel and the shadows took him is available from Simon and Schuster. He has just completed a new collection of stories called Hotel Júarez. He’s a professor of Fiction Writing, Kafka, and Latino/a literature in the Creative Writing Department at UTEP.