What would you do if strange letters began appearing in your mail box? Read them? When the unnamed narrator of this novel opens misdirected letters, he enters the harsh, disturbing world of Farrel Gorden. Gorden, an assistant manager in a sporting goods store near New Hampshire, hates his new Korean- American boss and is on the verge of losing control of his hatred. As we watch the narrator reconstruct the recent events in Gorden's life, including an affair with his boss' wife and the wrenching consequences that follow, the paths of these two disparate characters letter reader and letter writer converge violently as each intrudes on the life of the other. This is a story that blurs the distinction between the real and the imaginary, the violent and the mundane, and negotiates the exterior world and interior workings of a vengeful mind. "Chang narrates his passionate, downbeat tale with naturalistic distance and an authentic, even microscopic grasp of the...dead-end world Farrel [Gorden] inhabits...Chang is an exceptionally talented writer..." Kirkus Reviews
Leonard Chang was born in New York City, and grew up on Long Island, where he attended the public schools in Merrick. After high school, Leonard studied at Dartmouth College, interned with the Peace Corps in Kingston, Jamaica, and continued his studies in Philosophy at Harvard University, where he graduated with honors. He attended the graduate creative writing program at the University of California at Irvine, and received his Master's of Fine Arts. His first novel, entitled The Fruit 'N Food, was published in 1996 and won the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction that year, and is now taught at universities around the world. His second novel, Dispatches from the Cold, won a San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award for Literature. He is also the author of a popular and critically-acclaimed noir trilogy, which includes Over the Shoulder, Underkill, and Fade to Clear, a USA Today Summer Reading Pick and a finalist for the Shamus Award. His latest, Crossings, was published in 2009. His novels have been translated into French, Japanese and Korean, and are regularly studied in literature, sociology and theology courses throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Recently the U.S. Consulate in Berlin sponsored his multi-city lecture/reading tour of Germany.
In addition to novels, he writes short stories, essays, and book reviews, and his work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including The Crescent Review, Prairie Schooner, Confluence, The Literary Review, Bamboo Ridge, and Lynx Eye. He was a Visiting Distinguished Writer at Mills College, and currently teaches at Antioch University's MFA Program.
