Syosset Library Author Series Kicks Off Friday

There's nothing like a good book to curl up with that takes you to faraway lands. 

The Syosset Public Library is giving residents plenty of options via a visiting author series. Sonya Chung leads off at 1:30 p.m. on Friday. An award-winning literary writer, Chung will discuss her debut novel Long for This World (Scribner), described as a multi layered story of  "different kinds of women making their way in the world," she says.    

The novel starts in 1953 on a remote island in South Korea, where a young boy stows away on a ferry that his brother and his wife ventured to the mainland on, seeking a different life. Cut to 52 years later: Han Hyun-kyu is on a plane back to Korea to stay, leaving his own wife and grown children in America.  

His daughter, Jane, a war photographer injured in a bombing in Baghdad and forced back to New York, journeys to find him in the South Korean town where his brothers live. Their story takes twists and turns in father/daughter symphony of two lives filled with demons and passions. Through a tragedy, they are able to find themselves.

Chung cleverly shifts between first- and third-person point-of-view to depict the interactive movement between Korea and the United States.

"I decided early on to take a risk and break from the commercial standard and change points of view from first to third person," Chung says. "It helped the collage take shape. Jane's more individualistic character I heard in first person, and the older characters defined by their community lent itself to a more zoomed out third-person lens."

She says she kind of saw one character back in 2004 as she began the novel, and followed her instinct. Chung's previous body of work constituted shorter "stories," but this is her first longer work in a novel.

"In the short story, I didn't feel like I was hitting my stride, but as I began taking notes and writing, it began to grow and realized I was organically forming a novel," Chung says.  "I felt very comfortable in this form."

Chung wanted to contrast the complexity and mystery of Jane's life, where she goes to all kinds of dangerous places and daringly lives the life of a war photographer. On the flip side, different members of the same family contribute to that family's evolution.

Long for This World has some roots in her own life. Chung's father, the sixth in the middle of a large Korean family of 12 brothers and sisters, immigrated to the United States. He attended medical school and became a doctor. A few years ago, when Chung was 30, she visited Korea and spent time with an aunt she barely knew.

"We didn't really talk much, but she held kind of a mysterious competence and I imagined a story around and for her," Chung says. "Soon, a tale began to unfold."

"I'm the youngest sibling of three girls. Fiction is kind of a method acting way for me to explore lives and characters of others; wondering what it is like to have a brother," says Chung. In her 30s, she splits her time between bustling Manhattan and quiet, rural Pennsylvania, where she likes to jog or go for walks with her dog Pax.

Chung's stories, reviews and essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Crab Orchard Review, Sonora Review and BOMB Magazine, among others. She is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, and the Bronx Council on the Arts Writers' Fellowship & Residency. She is working on a political novel about the friendship between two men with a current working title Sebastian and Frederic.

After years as an adjunct creative writing professor, in fall 2010 she will teach both undergraduate and graduate creative writing at Columbia University.

Follow Sonya Chung's blog and check out Sonya's work at www.sonyachung.com. Friend her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/Long.for.This.World. See other authors visiting the Syosset Public Library at www.syossetlibrary.org/readers/prog_monthly.php.