Amy Tan
Amy Tan, born February 19, 1952, in Oakland, California, is a novelist, memoirist, children’s book writer, and most recently a close observer of birds, painting and writing personal essays thereof. She is best known for her first novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989), published when she was 37. She had served unwittingly a long apprenticeship as a business writer for large corporations, which undoubtedly contributed to the clarity of her prose, a pragmatic flow of information and imagery under firm and confident management. Her parents are first-generation Chinese-Americans, and she has chosen emigration and assimilation - and continuity - as a theme in her fiction. Because of this, Tan has been interpreted as a “representative” writer, someone expressing wide cultural generalities, which she has rejected, and which, frankly, any unbiased reader finds a misguided criticism. Read her for being Amy Tan, an excellent writer, an empathetic human being, an observant artist. Enjoy and marvel.
Saving Fish From Drowning
Saving Fish From Drowning
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Backyard Bird Chronicles and The Joy Luck Club comes “a rollicking, adventure-filled story . . . packed [with] the human capacity for love” (USA Today).
“Amy Tan has created an almost magical adventure that, page by page, becomes a metaphor for human relationships.”—Isabel Allende
A SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
San Francisco art patron Bibi Chen has planned a journey of the senses along the famed Burma Road for eleven lucky friends. But after her mysterious death, Bibi watches aghast from her ghostly perch as the travelers veer off her itinerary and get bogged down by cultural gaffes, tribal curses, and romantic desires. On Christmas morning, the tourists cruise across a misty lake and disappear.
With a façade of Buddhist illusions, magician’s tricks, and light comedy, even as the absurd and picaresque spiral into a gripping morality tale, Saving Fish from Drowning deftly explores the consequences of intentions—both good and bad—and the shared responsibility that individuals must accept for the actions of others.