We knew Hyeonseo Lee’s solo talk was going to be a hot ticket, but we didn’t quite expect it to sell out within two weeks. In the weeks since, the wait list has steadily expanded, to the point where we had to do this: give her a second solo. So this Sunday, March 27 at 6 pm, Hyeonseo Lee will be giving an encore to her book talk, The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story. Tickets are now available both online and at The Bookworm. (more…)

Due to a last-minute emergency, Roxane Gay is no longer able to travel to China. She sends her regrets and regards, and says the trip would have been a highlight. Roxane’s solo event on Sunday, March 13 has been cancelled, and we will provide a full refund to everyone who purchased a ticket to this event. The panel discussion she was scheduled to appear at on Tuesday, March 15, Voices from the Margins, will go on as planned with Xiao Meili and He Xiaopei speaking with Emily Rauhala, but we will also offer a full refund to those who request it. (more…)

Jess Row is the author of two short story collections — The Train to Lo Wu andNobody Ever Gets Lost — and the novel Your Face in Mine. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Ploughshares, Granta,American Short Fiction, Harvard Review, etc., have been anthologized three times inThe Best American Short Stories, and have won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award, among other prizes. In 2007 he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. He is currently teaching at The College of New Jersey and is a faculty member of the MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong. (more…)

With International Women’s Day (March 8) in mind, Read Paper Republic has selected four short stories from China that focus on highly charged issues such as sexual freedom, political disappearances, “leftover” women, and compromising situations. A woman trapped in a loveless marriage has an awkward, but ultimately empowering, one-night stand. A wife comes home to find her husband has disappeared, or rather “been disappeared.” The colleagues of a career woman apply their engineering expertise to the intractable problem of finding her a worthy husband. A young woman refuses to sleep with her boss, with catastrophic consequences for her family. (more…)

Our first event is at 1 pm with Agnes Desarthe, with the Opening Ceremony at 8 pm. Multiple events every day from now until March 27. Happy festivalling!

We have five terrific French-speaking authors at this year’s Bookworm Literary Festival, and three French-language events. It all begins tomorrow at 1 pm, when Agnes Desarthe speaks with reporter Becky Davis about women in literature. Check out what else is in store: (more…)

Mariko Nagai is a much-awarded poet and author, a recipient of the Pushcart Prize in both poetry and fiction, and the most recent winner of the Les Figues Press NOS Book Contest for her forthcoming novel Irradiated Cities. Her collection of poems, Histories of Bodies, won the Benjamin Saltman Prize from Red Hen Press, and her first collection of stories,Georgic: Stories, won the 2009 G.S. Sharat Chandra Fiction Prize from BkMk Press. Her other books include the poetry collection Instructions for the Living and novel Dust of Eden, which we review below. Nagai was born in Tokyo and raised in Europe and America. (more…)

In Andy McGuire’s poetry, we are bombarded with images, from birds to Floridians, mosquitoes to beaches underneath boardwalks. Readers must duck and weave, eluding their sharp edges and simultaneously hoping to catch them like raindrops. McGuire’s poems have appeared in Riddle Fence, Hazlitt, and The Walrus. He earned the right to appear at the Bookworm Literary Festival after winning the first-ever Poetry Games held at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. (more…)

Jordi Puntí was born in 1967 and lives in Barcelona. He writes in Catalan and has published two books of short stories: Pell d’armadillo (Armadillo Skin) (1998) and Animals tristos (Sad Animals) (2002). In 2010 he published his first novel, Lost Luggage, which is reviewed below. His most recent book is Els castellans (2011), a memoir about the daily life in a Catalan industrial town in the 1970s, focusing on the relationship between Catalan kids and the immigrants arrived from Spain. (more…)

Nicholas YB Wong is a poet of multis — of culture, lingua, layer, dimension. He is, as Ravi Shankar puts it, “the future of global poetry,” one who writes with a multiplicity of voices on a multitude of subjects, from Lady Gaga and Wong Kar-wai to Sharon Olds and Eeyore to the letters of James Schuyler to Frank O’Hara. An instructor at the City University of Hong Kong, he’s the author of the collections Cities of Sameness and, most recently, Crevasse, which has been praised as “a book of action” (Jericho Brown). (more…)