Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Join us at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park as JET alumna Malena Watrous reads from her remarkable debut novel, If You Follow Me.

Hoping to outpace her grief in the wake of her father’s suicide, Marina has come to the small, rural Japanese town of Shika to teach English for a year. But in Japan, as she soon discovers, you can never really throw away your past…or anything else, for that matter.

If You Follow Me is at once a fish-out-of-water tale, a dark comedy of manners, and a strange kind of love story. Alive with vibrant and unforgettable characters—from an ambitious town matchmaker to a high school student-cum-rap artist wannabe with an addiction to self-tanning lotion—it guides readers over cultural bridges even as it celebrates the awkward, unlikely triumph of the human spirit.

Malena Watrous was placed by the JET Program in Shika-Machi, the nuclear power plant town in which she set her new novel, If You Follow Me. After two years in the rice paddies of rural Japan, Malena moved straight to the cornfields of Iowa, where she completed her MFA in fiction from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Triquarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and Kyoto Journal. The winner of the Michener-Copernicus Award, she lives in San Francisco.

Location:
Kepler’s Books & Magazines
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA
Map

Time:
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
7:30 pm

Cost:
Free & open to the public.

The Japan Society kindly thanks Kepler’s Books & Magazines for hosting this event. For additional information, please visit Kepler’s website or call Kepler’s at 650-324-4321.