This event is part of our 39th season of Portland Arts & Lectures. For more information on the season, please see our FAQs or reach out to Literary Arts at la@literary-arts.org or call 503-227-2583. 

Charles Yu is the author of four books of fiction, including the novels Interior Chinatown, the winner of the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, and How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, a New York Times notable book and a Time magazine best book of the year. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications.

Praise:

For Interior Chinatown:

“Charles Yu was a story editor for Westworld, and his bracingly metafictive second novel, Interior Chinatown, takes the theme of social roles beautifully sideway . . . Interior Chinatown solders together mordant wit and melancholic whimsy to produce a moving exploration of race and assimilation that shouldn’t be missed by intellectually adventurous readers.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“By turns hilarious and flat-out heartbreaking, Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown is a bright, bold, gut punch of a novel. Written in the form of a screenplay with porous boundaries, Yu’s wonderfully inventive work spotlights the welter of obstacles its everyman protagonist must confront in a profoundly racist, rigidly hierarchical world as he does his best—in the story of his own life—to land a decent role.” –National Book Award Citation

For How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe:

“In this debut novel, Charles Yu continues his ambitious exploration of the fantastic with a whimsical yet sincere tribute to old-school science fiction and quantum physics. . . . A fascinating, philosophical and disorienting thriller about life and the context that gives it meaning.” –Kirkus Reviews