Amy Tan: Portland Arts & Lectures 2024–25
$115–$450 (five-part series)
This event is part of our 40th anniversary season of Portland Arts & Lectures. A subscription to the five-part series is required to attend this event.
Amy Tan is the author of the bestselling novel The Joy Luck Club, which spent 40 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list after its release. When the novel got adapted into a film in 1993, Tan served as co-producer and co-screenwriter with Ron Bass. Tan wrote five additional novels (all New York Times bestsellers), two memoirs, and several essay collections. Tan has received many honors, including the Commonwealth Gold Award and the Carl Sandburg Literary Award. She currently lives with her husband and dogs in New York and California.
Praise:
For The Joy Luck Club:
“Reading it really changed the way I thought about Asian-American history. Our heritage has a lot of difficult stuff in it — a lot of misogyny, a lot of fear and rage and death. It showed me a past that reached beyond borders and languages and cultures to bring together these disparate elements of who we are. I hadn’t seen our history like that before. At that time, we hadn’t seen a lot of Asian-American representations anywhere, so it was a big deal that it even existed. It made me feel validated and seen. That’s what’s so important about books like that. You feel like, Oh my god, I exist here. I exist in this landscape of literature and memoir. I’m here, and I have a story to tell, and it’s among the canon of Asian-American stories that are feminist and that are true to our being. It’s a book that has stayed with me and lived in me.” —Margaret Cho, The Cut
“In the hands of a less talented writer such thematic material might easily have become overly didactic, and the characters might have seemed like cutouts from a Chinese American knockoff of ‘Roots.’ But in the hands of Amy Tan, who has a wonderful eye for what is telling, a fine ear for dialogue, a deep empathy for her subject matter and a guilelessly straightforward way of writing, they sing with a rare fidelity and beauty. She has written a jewel of a book.” —The New York Times
For The Bonesetter’s Daughter:
“But the elaborate preparation pays generous dividends in the stunning final 50 or so pages: a beautifully modulated amalgam of grief, pride, resentment, and resignation. . . . Tan strikes gold once again.” —Kirkus Reviews
