Tom's guest is the award-winning author Chang-rae Lee.  He is the author of six novels.  His first, Native Speaker, earned the 1996 Hemingway Foundation/Pen Award for First Fiction.  The Surrendered, which he published in 2008, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  A subsequent novel, On Such a Full Sea, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of the 2015 Heartland Fiction Prize...

The Korean-American writer's latest novel is a stunning, wild tale whose protagonist is a 20-year-old, somewhat aimless college student from New Jersey named Tiller Bardmon.  The book is a collection of Tiller’s reflections on the relationships he has with a charismatic businessman, and later, a young mother and her son.   It’s called My Year Abroad.

Chang-rae Lee is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University in California.  He joins us today on Zoom...