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.
The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life
The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life
Delve into the stories from Amy Tan’s life that inspired bestselling novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement and the new memoir, Where the Past Begins
Amy Tan has touched millions of readers with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world’s best-loved novelists. Whether recalling arguments with her mother in suburban California or introducing us to the ghosts that inhabit her computer, The Opposite of Fate offers vivid portraits of choices, attitudes, charms, and luck in action–a refreshing antidote to the world-weariness and uncertainties we all face today.