"[Max Yeh] is a writer on the rampage, but his appetite is for history, for political meaning, for ethical life … He imagines America back to Columbus and forward again, mapping his own brain, and possibly ours…" —E.L. DoctorowMade available again by Kaya Press for the first time in decades, The Beginning of the East is an audacious, high-wire grappling with the world-making powers of the literary imagination as filtered through the experiences of an American scholar of Chinese descent and his attempt to map out the impact of Columbus' "aberrations, delusions and fantasies" on the brutality and political posturing of the American present. Having uprooted himself and his family from California to Mexico City, the narrator is even more radically unmoored when an earthquake forces him into an acute awareness of the physicality of experience. This dazzling tapestry of stories travels east to a mythic Cathay and west to the New World, sliding between points of view and time periods to demonstrate what can be wrought by the imagination.Max Yeh is the author of a trilogy of novels: The Beginning of the East (1992), Stolen Oranges (2017) and Ramblings in the West: Footnotes (2025).

A sprawling epic of Western civilization where Greek theater, Marxist thought, British imperialism and American football collideIn Ramblings in the West, the third of Max Yeh's book-length "pseudo-fictions," time and space collapse into a continuous, digressive stream where the giants of the past become everyday people. Lying on his couch while his back heals, the unnamed narrator imagines his life as a travel memoir in the mode of Herodotus, Montesquieu or Goldsmith. He does so through the repeated invocation of the long-held Western tradition of using foreign visitors to bridge the East–West divide. These feats of perspectival dexterity make it possible for him to drive Jean-Jacques Rousseau from the Syracuse Airport and listen to Isaac Newton lecture on the laws of motion and chat with Charles Darwin as he tries to understand who and why he is. Elliptical and encyclopedic, Ramblings in the West blends travel memoir and dream journal to show how our lives carry the story of civilization itself.Max Yeh is the author of a trilogy of novels: The Beginning of the East (1992), Stolen Oranges (2017) and Ramblings in the West: Footnotes (2025).

"[Max Yeh] is a writer on the rampage, but his appetite is for history, for political meaning, for ethical life … He imagines America back to Columbus and forward again, mapping his own brain, and possibly ours…" —E.L. DoctorowMade available again by Kaya Press for the first time in decades, The Beginning of the East is an audacious, high-wire grappling with the world-making powers of the literary imagination as filtered through the experiences of an American scholar of Chinese descent and his attempt to map out the impact of Columbus' "aberrations, delusions and fantasies" on the brutality and political posturing of the American present. Having uprooted himself and his family from California to Mexico City, the narrator is even more radically unmoored when an earthquake forces him into an acute awareness of the physicality of experience. This dazzling tapestry of stories travels east to a mythic Cathay and west to the New World, sliding between points of view and time periods to demonstrate what can be wrought by the imagination.Max Yeh is the author of a trilogy of novels: The Beginning of the East (1992), Stolen Oranges (2017) and Ramblings in the West: Footnotes (2025).

A sprawling epic of Western civilization where Greek theater, Marxist thought, British imperialism and American football collideIn Ramblings in the West, the third of Max Yeh's book-length "pseudo-fictions," time and space collapse into a continuous, digressive stream where the giants of the past become everyday people. Lying on his couch while his back heals, the unnamed narrator imagines his life as a travel memoir in the mode of Herodotus, Montesquieu or Goldsmith. He does so through the repeated invocation of the long-held Western tradition of using foreign visitors to bridge the East–West divide. These feats of perspectival dexterity make it possible for him to drive Jean-Jacques Rousseau from the Syracuse Airport and listen to Isaac Newton lecture on the laws of motion and chat with Charles Darwin as he tries to understand who and why he is. Elliptical and encyclopedic, Ramblings in the West blends travel memoir and dream journal to show how our lives carry the story of civilization itself.Max Yeh is the author of a trilogy of novels: The Beginning of the East (1992), Stolen Oranges (2017) and Ramblings in the West: Footnotes (2025).