Samuel Park is an Assistant Professor of English at Columbia College Chicago. He is a graduate of Stanford and the University of Southern California, where he earned his doctorate in English. He is the author of the novella Shakespeare's Sonnets and the writer-director of the short film of the same name, which was an official selection of numerous domestic and international film festivals.His new novel is This Burns My Heart.
A few weeks ago I asked him what he was reading. His reply:
I recently finished Jean Kwok’s Girl in Translation, a terrific novel about a Chinese girl who immigrates to America and discovers the underbelly of the American Dream.Visit Samuel Park's website and blog.Kwok offers a surprising but satisfying twist on the expected happy ending. I’m also rereading Janice Y. K. Lee’s wonderful The Piano Teacher, about a young English woman discovering her true self in the aftermath of World War II. I love, in particular, Lee’s descriptions of the heroine, Clare Pendleton. They absolutely fly off the page. As we see the effect of Hong Kong on Clare, Lee catches her changing in front of the reader’s eyes, and that sense of metamorphosis infuses every page with drama and conflict. Lee is brilliant at many things, but especially in connecting character with setting.
The Page 69 Test: This Burns My Heart.
--Marshal Zeringue
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