Author Talk: Chang-rae Lee — A Tender Age - with Kat Chow

Author Chang-rae Lee discusses their book "A Tender Age" at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

From the Pulitzer Prize finalist, a story of 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.

Chang-rae Lee is the author of six other novels, including Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, and The Surrendered, winner of the Dayton Peace Prize and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A 2021 winner of the Award of Merit for the Novel from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Chang-rae Lee teaches writing at Stanford University.

Lee is in conversation with Kat Chow, the author of Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir, named a Notable Book by The New York Times. She was a reporter at NPR, where she helped start the Code Switch team and podcast. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and on Radiolab, among others. She’s received residency fellowships from Storyknife and Millay Arts, and taught creative writing at The George Washington University as the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington. Currently, she is a visiting professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE:

Visit us online at

#books #booktube