Authors on Tap: Katie Yee and Jessamine Chan

Please join us in person on Saturday, July 26th at 7:00pm central to help celebrate Katie Yee's new novel, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar. Katie will be in conversation with Jessamine Chan!

About Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar:

A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie.

A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak—it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie.

Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation. She starts talking to Maggie (the tumor), getting acquainted with her body’s new inhabitant. She overgenerously creates a “Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual” for Maggie (the other woman), hoping to ease the process of discovering her ex-husband’s whims and quirks. She turns her children’s bedtime stories into retellings of Chinese folklore passed down by her own mother, in an attempt to make them fall in love with their shared culture—and to maybe save herself in the process.

In the style of Jenny Offill and the tradition of Nora Ephron’s hilarious and devastating writing on heartbreak and womanhood, Maggie is a master class in transforming personal tragedy into a form of defiant comedy.

About the authors:

Katie Yee is a writer from Brooklyn. She has received fellowships from the Center for Fiction, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and Kundiman. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, No Tokens, The Believer, the Washington Square Review, Triangle House, Epiphany, and Literary Hub. By day, she works at the Brooklyn Museum. By night, she writes, usually under the watch of her judgmental rescue dog, Ollie.

Jessamine Chan is the author of The School for Good Mothers, which was a New York Times bestseller, a Read with Jenna/TODAY Show Book Club pick, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Carnegie Medal, and one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022. Translations in twenty languages have been published or are forthcoming. She lives in Chicago with her family.

About this event:

This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the link below to register for free. Katie and Jessamine will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available in store and online with national shipping!

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