Stories of Self
In a rapidly changing world, how do we navigate identity, expectation, and belonging? This panel brings together three authors whose work captures the instability and reinvention of the self, illuminating how history, culture, and ambition collide in the search for meaning.
| Where: | Koffler Room 218 (Seats 142, Wheelchair accessible)  |
| When: | Sun, Mar 15, 1:00 pm - 1:55 pm |
| Signing area: | Sales & Signing Koffler/Commons (following presentation)
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| Genre: | Fiction / Literature |
| Moderator: | Anne Gardner |
Panelists
Jade ChangJade Chang’s debut novel, "The Wangs vs. the World," won the VCU-Cabell First Novelist Award and has been published in a dozen countries. Her journalism and essays have recently appeared in The Best American Food Writing, and in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times....
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Ed ParkEd Park is the author of "Personal Days" and "Same Bed Different Dreams," a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent book, "An Oral History of Atlantis," is a story collection....
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Shobha RaoShobha Rao is the author of "An Unrestored Woman," a short story collection, and the novels "Girls Burn Brighter" and "Indian Country." She is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and was a Grace Paley Teaching Fellow at The New School....
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Books:
What a Time to Be Alive
A Novel
Jade Chang
Fiction / Literature
HarperCollins Publishers
September 2025
ISBN 9780063416390
304 pages
Buy now
An Oral History of Atlantis
Stories
Ed Park
Fiction / Literature
Random House
July 2025
ISBN 9780812998993
224 pages
Buy now
Indian Country
A Novel
Shobha Rao
Fiction / Literature
Random House
August 2025
ISBN 9780593798959
Hardcover, 432 pages
Buy nowFrom the award-winning author of "Girls Burn Brighter," a couple from India—so different from generations of white colonialists who came before them—move to Montana, only to discover the secrets the land holds in this stunning literary novel.
Janavi and Sagar were never meant to end up married. Janavi is a wonderfully independent, young modern Indian woman. She works for an organization in India that helps street children, often lost to the world of human trafficking. Sagar is a trained hydraulic engineer, an expert in dam construction. He is the least favorite son, his parents never able to forgive him for an unspeakable act from his past. Sagar seeks refuge in his daydreams of one day finding hidden treasures in the fabled Indian river, the Ganges.
Yet the two are forced together into an arranged marriage which neither of them wants. Even worse, Sagar has already accepted a job in America, in a strange place called Montana, where he will be in charge of dismantling a dam.
Montana upends all their expectations. Sagar's white colleagues do not welcome him with open arms, and Janavi finds herself unable to forgive her sister who stayed behind in India whose betrayal led her to this marriage and this strange place.
When a colleague of Sagar's is found drowned, Sagar is the obvious scapegoat. But is this death one in a long history of people of color paying the price for the white man's arrogance and expansionism?
Just like the Ganges river that dominates Sagar's dreams, throughout the novel runs short historical stories of settlers who conquered, both the west and India, who form the foundation upon which Sagar and Janavi stand.
A bold, ambitious, stunningly beautiful yet brutal novel about colonialism and the rippling ramifications still felt today, "Indian Country" is a tour de force modern-day classic. More/less
