Our audio series "The Authors Read. We Listen." is an incredibly special one for us. Hatched in a NYC club during BEA week, this feature requires more work of the author than any of the ones that have come before. And that makes it all the more sweeter when you see, or rather, hear them read excerpts from their own novels, in their own voices, the way their stories were meant to be heard.
Today, Sybil Baker reads to us from her novel Into This World. She is also the author of The Life Plan and Talismans. She teaches at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga as well as in the City University of Hong Kong's MFA program and the Yale Writers' Conference. Sybil Baker was named one of "today's strongest emerging talents in literary fiction and poetry" by the Huffington Post. Recently she was a Visiting Writer at the American Writers Festival in Singapore, where she was awarded the National Critics Choice Best New Cross Cultural Literary Fiction and Poetry Writer of the Year. A recipient of Chattanooga's MakeWork Grant, she is Fiction Editor at Drunken Boat.
Click the soundcloud link below to experience Into This World, as read by author Sybil Baker.
The word on Into This World:
The answering machine picked up after the fourth ring. "Are you my father?" On the day Allison Morehouse walks off her job, her sister Mina calls from Korea, frantic and in tears. Determined to discover the truth about her adopted sister, Allison flies to Seoul, yet Mina-and Korea-are nothing like Allison imagines. Over the next three months, Allison and Mina will unearth thirty years of family secrets-and Allison will discover in Mina the sister she never embraced and in herself, the stronger woman she can be. This story of sisterhood, betrayal, and a tangled history of love and deception will carry you halfway around the world and deep into the hearts of two sisters whose fates were shaped by a long-lost love and the lies it spawned... and the history of a country and a man they never understood. "Sybil Baker is a startlingly good writer. The big cities and small villages of Korea feel alive on every page. And if you think there's nothing fresh to say about the fragility of family bonds, read Into This World. Only in the best-told stories, like this one, may we measure and forgive one another, and ourselves." -Nance Van Winckel, author of No Starling. "Vivid writing compels us to make this journey through the streets and temples of Seoul. Baker's fresh and graceful plotting fuels the reader's hunger to know what will happen next to these sisters in a family and a country torn apart by the past." -Jane Bradley, author of You Believers "A story of one family's secret history glimpsed through the eyes of two estranged sisters; Allison, a troubled woman still grieving the loss of her unborn child, and Mina, a half-Korean expatriate in search of her shadowy past. Beautifully told, Sybil Baker weaves a lush, finely wrought tale of two daughters in search of love, two sisters in search of forgiveness in the middle of a foreign land." -Cathy Holton, author of Summer in the South
Thanks for having me! Sybil
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