Education
Born in Hong Kong, Chong studied at the University of British Columbia and Columbia University, where he received an Master of Fine Arts in fiction writing.
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book
Baroque-A-Nova
("An excellent first novel. Chong captures teen angst with...)
"An excellent first novel. Chong captures teen angst with white-hot, dead-on language. . . . Sensitive, wry observations remind the reader of Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye." (The Montreal Gazette) During the week following the death of his long-absent famous folksinger mother, Saul St. Pierre must contend with the TV crews, fans, and assorted oddballs who flood the suburb where he lives, even as he struggles to understand his mother's reasons for taking her own life-and for abandoning him years before. It doesn't help matters that his stepmother, Jana, the only reliable adult he's ever known, is dating a cop who wants to marry her. And he and his friend Navi are suspended from school for staging a demonstration against censorship. Then there is the arrival of the two young women from New York, inspired by the St. Pierres' nostalgia boom, who come to worship at the feet of Saul's father, an alcohol-guzzling musical has-been. But this is no mere tale of motherless youth, because Kevin Chong eschews the melodramatic and familiar to create an inspired-and sometimes absurd-coming-of-age story that embraces the unexpected poetry of tacky pop culture and marginal celebrity. And whether Baroque-a-Nova is read as a "witty postmodern farce" (The Globe and Mail) or a "deftly shaped, deceptively simple story about a boy poised on the threshold of manhood" (The Vancouver Sun), it is, to its very core, about love, forgiveness, and the search for truth and beauty in our junked-up lives
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005Q7IVIA/?tag=2022091-20
Beauty Plus Pity
( "Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a d...)
"Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a definition of art."—Vladimir Nabokov In this tragicomic modern immigrant's tale, Malcolm Kwan is a slacker twentysomething Asian-Canadian living in Vancouver who is about to embark on a modelling career when his life is suddenly derailed by two near-simultaneous events: the death of his filmmaker father, and the betrayal of his fiancée who has left him. Soon he meets Hadley, the half-sister he never knew existed?the result of his father's extramarital affair?and as their tentative relationship grows, Malcolm is forced to confront his past relationships with women, including his own mother, an art teacher working through her grief as well as her resentment at her son befriending her husband's daughter. Written with a winsome yet plaintive eye, Beauty Plus Pity is about a young man who's forced to reckon with the past as he works through his lifelong ambivalence toward his hyphenated cultural identity, and between two parents holding intolerable secrets. Kevin Chong is the author of the novel Baroque-a-Nova (Plume) and the memoir Neil Young Nation (Greystone Books).
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1551524163/?tag=2022091-20
Kevin Chong
Edit ProfileCareer
His first novel, Baroque-a-Nova, was published in Canada by Penguin in 2001, in the United States by Putnam in 2002, and in France by Ballard in 2002. The New York Times Book Review describes the book as "a readable, if slightly gray, coming-of-age novel." The Quill and Quire described the book as "compact, clear-sighted, and nervy. Chong"s grasp of suburban tackiness is laugh-out-loud awesome, right down to the ubiquitous copies of Maclean"s magazine on parental coffee tables and trick or treaters dressed as Orville Redenbacher."
His second book Neil Young Nation (2005), a non-fiction work, traces the steps of Neil Young"s 1970 trip across Canada and the United States.
Chong works extensively as a freelance journalist.
He is a practitioner of the martial art-like aerobic exercise form Tae Bo, and had a minor role in the film Bloodsport II: The Next Kumite He is also active in Vancouver"s underground music scene, performing jazz under his stage name, "Butterscotch Panda.".
Achievements
Works
book
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Beauty Plus Pity
( "Beauty plus pity—that is the closest we can get to a d...)
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Baroque-A-Nova
("An excellent first novel. Chong captures teen angst with...)
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Beauty Plus Pity
