WCF presents award-winning author Jane Hamilton (Map of the World, Laura Rider's Masterpiece), who will host a reading and conversation with Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves) and Gail Tsukiyama (A Hundred Flowers). In Gail Tsukiyama's A Hundred Flowers it's China, 1957-the start of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Chairman Mao has declared a new openness in society, but one July morning 5-year-old Tao watches helplessly as his father is dragged away to a labor camp for writing a letter criticizing the Communist Party. Tao's mother must struggle to hold her small family together despite her husband's absence, and other members of the household must face their own guilty secrets and strive to find peace in a world where the old sense of order is falling. Tsukiyama brings us a powerfully moving story of ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances with grace and courage. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, is classic Karen Joy Fowler: subversive, visionary, wise, morally complex, and wickedly witty. But with its arresting premise, drawn from American animal behavior experiments dating back to the 1930's, it offers a startlingly original take on the dysfunctional American family, while raising intriguing questions about the limits of science and the rights of animals, as well as the intricacies of memory and forgetting, the power of language and storytelling, and the nature of human and animal consciousness.
