Harvard Book Store welcomes Chang-rae Lee—award-winning author of Native Speaker and The Surrendered—for a discussion of his new novel, A Tender Age. He will be joined in conversation by Claire Messud—author of six works of fiction and the Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard University.
About A Tender Age
Guilt, innocence, and a boy on the cusp of adolescence.
A spellbinding exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants, A Tender Age joins the rich tradition of the American bildungsroman. The natural descendent of characters like Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caufield, Korean-American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family.
Devastating in its emotional precision, A Tender Age captures a family and community in striking distance of the American dream, and a young person on the precipice of adult knowledge, looking at his own culpability and looking away—then thinking about it for the rest of his life.