Sonya Chung’s stories, reviews, & essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Crab Orchard Review, Tin House, Sonora Review, FiveChapters, The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books
Long for This World is her first novel.
Photo Credit: Robin Holland
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Some recent interviews:
Interview at Bookslut with Terry Hong
Audio interview with Rachel Glass of Evergreen Radio Reading Service in Seattle
Interview at The Millions with Edan Lepucki
Audio interview on WJFF 90.5 FM Catkills Public Radio with Ian Williams (click player below to listen)
Self-interview at The Nervous Breakdown
My Booknotes Music Playlist at Largehearted Boy
Strata Interview at Open Letters Monthly / Like Fire
Interview at Blogcritics with Carole McDonnell
Interview with Bethanne Patrick / WETA’s The Book Studio:
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Dear Sonya,
I just read your opinion about Lit vs. Genre fiction from your article that included Sherman Alexie’s quote about being taken for Goliath instead of David. I wanted to tell you that recently I’ve also noticed, with dismay, that many of the “Moms” on the school blacktop have stooped to reading the vampire books for teenage girls. It makes me want to divorce my girlfriends. Still, on Victoria Lautman’s Writers on the Record (on Chicago Public Radio) I’ve heard a few authors talking about their guilty pleasures of reading genre fiction and how they intend to break out of conventional writing and perhaps blend their writing. I’m not positive, but I think the writers I’ve heard mention this include Michael Cunningam, Jonathan Safran Foer (who loves Joseph Cornell and his abilities to create a message succinctly through art), and even Junot Diaz who embraces language in a clearly no-snobby way. These guys made me smile, because they wanted to break convention. JSF even said that some bad books have a place so that good ones can be written. We’ll see what they can come up with – and how book publishers will market them. Thank you for your convictions. Today, especially in the book publishing world, it’s hard to stand on strong literary legs.
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[...] cover of Sonya Chung’s debut novel, Long for This World (Scribner, March 2010), shows a young woman gazing out over a [...]
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[...] her mind she was thinking, “It is?” She and I have both been invited to do guest-blogging and interviews and events; so maybe that’s the red herring as far as a book’s “success”? Sales is its [...]
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[...] Sonya Chung has written an insightful piece on the writing life for The Millions. The essay’s central message is simple (and useful to all of us): keep writing. Chung also quotes Monday’s LitHouse guest Junot Díaz regarding the process of writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, five years into it: [...]