The Worlds We Make: Gish Jen in conversation with Billy Tsien October 21, 2010

Gish Jen's latest novel, World and Town, explores new starts and shifting American towns in what Publisher's Weekly heralds as an "expansive story of identity and acceptance." Hattie Kong loses her husband and best friend in the same year—"like having twins. She got to book the same church with the same pianist for both funerals and did think she should have gotten some sort of twofer from the crematorium." Resettling in Riverlake, a town of family farms and Christian fundamentalists, she forges unexpected companionships with an ex-lover and the Cambodian American family living in a trailer next door. Named one of the best novelists writing in the US today by Elaine Showalter in The Guardian, Jen will be in conversation with Billie Tsien, the much lauded architect behind the Neuroscience Institute, the American Folk Art Museum, and Cranbrook.