This event is part of our Newer Voices Series.
General Admission tickets are complimentary, but we encourage you to support these newer authors and purchase their books.

PURCHASE TICKETS 
Comp General Admission Tickets RSVP HERE 
$30 Reserved Seat + Book
$35 Two Reserved Section Seats + 1 book

Debut novelist Jade Chang has worked as an arts and culture journalist and editor for publications like the BBC, Metropolis, Glamour, and The Los Angeles Times Magazine. She was recently an editor at Goodreads. Her first paying job after college was as a researcher for the J. Peterman catalog. (Yes, where Elaine worked on Seinfeld—it’s real!). Jade is the recipient of a Sundance Arts Journalist fellowship, the AIGA/Winterhouse Design Criticism Award, and a Squaw Valley Writers Workshop scholarship. 

Fresh, energetic, and completely hilarious, The Wangs vs. the World is my favorite debut of the year.
—Jami Attenberg, author of Saint Mazie and The Middlesteins

A Chinese-American family tumbles from riches to rags in Chang’s jam-packed, high-energy debut….Switching among the points of view of all the Wangs and several supporting players, racing back and forth in time and across the country and the world, dropping into Chinese, stuffing in stand-up routines and savvy details on finance, journalism, the beauty industry, and the art world, this debut novelist holds nothing back. Head-spinning fun—Kirkus Reviews

The Wangs vs. the World is a hilarious debut novel about a wealthy but fractured Chinese immigrant family that had it all, only to lose every last cent—and about the road trip they take across America that binds them back together.

Charles Wang is mad at America. A brash, lovable immigrant businessman who built a cosmetics empire and made a fortune, he’s just been ruined by the financial crisis. Now all Charles wants is to get his kids safely stowed away so that he can go to China and attempt to reclaim his family’s ancestral lands—and his pride. 
  
Charles pulls Andrew, his aspiring comedian son, and Grace, his style-obsessed daughter, out of schools he can no longer afford. Together with their stepmother, Barbra, they embark on a cross-country road trip from their foreclosed Bel-Air home to the upstate New York hideout of the eldest daughter, disgraced art world it-girl Saina. But with his son waylaid by a temptress in New Orleans, his wife ready to defect for a set of 1,000-thread-count sheets, and an epic smash-up in North Carolina, Charles may have to choose between the old world and the new, between keeping his family intact and finally fulfilling his dream of starting anew in China. 
  
Outrageously funny and full of charm, The Wangs vs. the World is an entirely fresh look at what it means to belong in America—and how going from glorious riches to (still name-brand) rags brings one family together in a way money never could.  

Carolyn Kellogg is book editor of the Los Angeles Times. She is a recipient of the paper’s editorial award and she is a vice president of the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Kellogg has served as editor of LAist.com, web editor of Marketplace and has been widely published. She has an MFA in creative writing and a bachelor’s degree from USC.