VJ Books Presents Author Chang-rae Lee! Chang-rae Lee was born in Korea in 1965. He emigrated to the United States with his family when he was 3 years old. Raised in Westchester, New York, Lee attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He graduated from Yale University with a degree in English and from the University of Oregon with a MFA in writing. He worked as a Wall Street financial analyst for a year before turning to writing full time. Lee teaches writing at Princeton University, where he has served as the director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.
His first novel, Native Speaker (1995), won the PEN/Hemingway Award and centers around a Korean American industrial spy. The novel explores themes of alienation and betrayal as felt or perpetrated by immigrants and first-generation citizens, and played out in local politics. In 1999, he published his second novel, A Gesture Life. This elaborated on his themes of identity and assimilation through the narrative of an elderly Japanese-American who remembers treating Korean comfort women during World War II. His 2004 novel Aloft received mixed notices from the critics and featured Lee's first protagonist who is not Asian American, but a disengaged and isolated Italian-American suburbanite forced to deal with his world.
His upcoming novel is called 'The Surrendered'.
Chang-rae Lee selected by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best American writers under forty. He is the director of the MFA program at Hunter College in New York City.
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