Max Yeh NEWS
Join us for a reading and conversation with four outstanding Chinese writers whose works upend the notion of a monolithic Chinese identity and uncover a much more complicated story about the diversity of Chinese diasporic experiences in America: 2017 National Book Award finalist Lisa Ko (The Leavers), crime-writer-turned-YA-author Ed Lin (David Tung Can’t Have a […]
If you’re in the American Southwest, be sure to join Max Yeh at Bookworks in Albuquerque (NM), as he reads from his whirlwind work Stolen Oranges: Letters Between Cervantes and the Emperor of China, a Pseudo-Fiction. Stolen Oranges journeys to locations ranging from the archives of Imperial China to a rare book shop in Mexico […]
The Beginning of the East
Originally published in 1992, the year marking 500 years since Christopher Columbus’s world-altering voyages, Max Yeh’s first novel The Beginning of the East sets the explorer on a completely alternate voyage, remapped by a cartographer protagonist who is trying to comprehend the historical causes of imperialism and their reverberations in the present.
Starting with an earthquake in Mexico City, our cartographer sets off on a Scheherazade-like series of connected tales as he maps the influence of the United States on the rest of the Americas, of Europe on the Native American cultures, and therefore, into the character of Columbus himself. The narrative travels back to Europe and to Seville, the city where Columbus’s adventure began. There, as he relives in imagination the voyages of the great navigator, his own life and energized by an immense momentum, the narrative travels both forward and backward at once, both east to a mythic Cathay and west to the New World, where the protagonist ends up in a desolate town in the New Mexico desert in the company of down-and-outers who are fated to relive, as we all are, the primal contact of East and West initiated by Columbus.
Max Yeh NEWS
Join us for a reading and conversation with four outstanding Chinese writers whose works upend the notion of a monolithic Chinese identity and uncover a much more complicated story about the diversity of Chinese diasporic experiences in America: 2017 National Book Award finalist Lisa Ko (The Leavers), crime-writer-turned-YA-author Ed Lin (David Tung Can’t Have a […]
If you’re in the American Southwest, be sure to join Max Yeh at Bookworks in Albuquerque (NM), as he reads from his whirlwind work Stolen Oranges: Letters Between Cervantes and the Emperor of China, a Pseudo-Fiction. Stolen Oranges journeys to locations ranging from the archives of Imperial China to a rare book shop in Mexico […]
