Floyd Cheung – författare

In Depression-era New York, Mr Nut is an oblivious American everyman, who wants to strike it rich. Over the course of a single night he meets a cast of strange characters - disgruntled workers at a Communist cafeteria, lecherous old men, sexually exploited women and pesky authors - all of whom eventually convince him to cast off his bourgeois aspirations to become a radical activist. Absurdist, inventive and suffused with revolutionary fervour, The Hanging on Union Square is a work of blazing wit and originality.

No-No Boy, John Okada’s only published novel, centers on a Japanese American who refuses to fight for the country that incarcerated him and his people in World War II and, upon release from federal prison after the war, is cast out by his divided community. In 1957, the novel faced a similar rejection until it was rediscovered and reissued in 1976 to become a celebrated classic of American literature. As a result of Okada’s untimely death at age forty-seven, the author’s life and other works have remained obscure.This compelling collection offers the first full-length examination of Okada’s development as an artist, placing recently discovered writing by Okada alongside essays that reassess his lasting legacy. Meticulously researched biographical details, insight from friends and relatives, and a trove of intimate photographs illuminate Okada’s early life in Seattle, military service, and careers as a public librarian and a technical writer in the aerospace industry. This volume is an essential companion to No-No Boy.

No-No Boy, John Okada’s only published novel, centers on a Japanese American who refuses to fight for the country that incarcerated him and his people in World War II and, upon release from federal prison after the war, is cast out by his divided community. In 1957, the novel faced a similar rejection until it was rediscovered and reissued in 1976 to become a celebrated classic of American literature. As a result of Okada’s untimely death at age forty-seven, the author’s life and other works have remained obscure.This compelling collection offers the first full-length examination of Okada’s development as an artist, placing recently discovered writing by Okada alongside essays that reassess his lasting legacy. Meticulously researched biographical details, insight from friends and relatives, and a trove of intimate photographs illuminate Okada’s early life in Seattle, military service, and careers as a public librarian and a technical writer in the aerospace industry. This volume is an essential companion to No-No Boy.

A subversively comic, genre-bending satire of bourgeois life by an essential Chinese American voiceIt''s Depression-era New York, and Mr. Nut, an oblivious American everyman, wants to strike it rich, even if at the moment he''s unemployed, with no job prospects in sight. Over the course of a single night, in a narrative that unfolds hour by hour, he meets a cast of strange characters--disgruntled workers at a Communist cafeteria, lecherous old men, sexually exploited women, pesky authors--who eventually convince him to cast off his bourgeois aspirations for upward mobility and become a radical activist. Absurdist, inventive, and suffused with revolutionary fervor, and culminating in a dramatic face-off against capitalist power in the figure of the greedy businessman Mr. System, The Hanging on Union Square is a work of blazing wit and originality. More than eighty years after it was self-published, having been rejected by dozens of baffled publishers, it''s become a classic of Asian American literature--a satirical send-up of class politics and capitalism and a shout of populist rage that still resonates today.

“He brought symbolist-inflected poetry and drama to the US, became a respected art critic publishing in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work and Alfred Kreymborg’s Others, wrote some of the earliest English-language haiku, and even became a Hollywood showman later in life, famously playing the court magician in Douglas Fairbanks’s The Thief of Bagdad. Despite increasing attention to Hartmann, not until this collection, beautifully put together by Floyd Cheung in a Little Island Press edition, do Hartmann’s achievements in the lyric come into full view.” – the Modernist Review