Multi-award-winner fiction writer Peter Ho Davies will read on Friday, May 5, at 7:30 p.m., in the Austin Reading Room of the Jereld R. Nicholson Library at Linfield College.
Davies will read from his new novel, “The Fortunes,” a sly, funny, intelligent and artfully structured piece. “The Fortunes” recasts American history through the lives of Chinese-Americans and reimagines the multi-generational novel through the fractures of immigrant family experience. This novel captures and capsizes more than a century of Chinese-American history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive. Building fact into fiction, spinning fiction around fact, Davies uses each of these stories—three inspired by real historical characters—to examine the process of becoming not only Chinese-American, but American.
Davies is the author of two novels, “The Fortunes” (winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award) and “The Welsh Girl” (long-listed for the Man Booker Prize), and two short story collections, “The Ugliest House in the World” and “Equal Love.” His work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic and The Paris Review among others, and has been chosen repeatedly for the awards series’ Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Houghton-Mifflin’s Best American Short Stories. In 2003 GRANTA magazine named him among its Best of Young British Novelists.
Davies has received prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a winner of the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in writing the short story. Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, he now makes his home in the United States, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan.
This reading is a part of the “Readings at the Nick” series. The lecture is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Linfield Nicholson Library and the Linfield English department. For more information, contact Susan Barnes Whyte at 503-883-2517, swhyte@linfield.edu.
