The word speaks for itself and she isn't about to demean herself by supplying personal color. She responds with a cold, 'That's nobody's business but theirs.' Ask her to describe her days as a factchecker at the New Yorker and she becomes downright derisive. Drawn by her striking talent, an interviewer succumbs to a natural curiosity about the divorce between her Corean father and her Russian Jew mother when Choi was nine. It is an inevitable reflection of the author's passion for shadow. The words seem to have been layered on the page in tightly overlapping swirls in a process reminiscent of ion deposition. It progresses more by fermentation of accumulated detail rather than by anything resembling action or, heaven forbid, plot. It also holds ample evidence of the quality that augurs continued critical acclaim but media obscurity: an aversion to direct sunlight. If anything, her first novel ( The Foreign Student, HarperCollins, 1998) brims with more promise than Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker in terms of narrative intensity, emotional maturity and fragrance, that hallmark of Southern novels. Susan Choi is easily the lesser-known of the two, but not necessarily the one possessing lesser talent. He past decade produced two Asian Americans universally hailed by the literary establishment as possessing first-order novelistic talent. No part of the contents of this site may be reproduced without prior written permission. Susan Choi makes a luminous stand at the subversive, secret intersection between mistrust of society and the struggle for emotional survival. Susan Choi: Shadow Novelist 1/4 | Asian American Personalities |

American woman by susan choi