Our staff at White Whale loves to celebrate debut authors! We are ecstatic to welcome Katie Yee to our store to celebrate the publication of her taut, wry, and glorious debut fiction novel about a woman who spins tragedy into comedy when her life falls apart: MAGGIE; OR A MAN AND A WOMAN WALK INTO A BAR. Katie will be joined in conveersation by writer, editor, and great friend of Whte Whale, Robert Yune.
A Chinese American woman spins tragedy into comedy when her life falls apart in a taut, wry debut novel that grapples with grief, motherhood, and myths—perfect for fans of Joan Is Okay and Crying in H Mart.
A man and a woman walk into a restaurant. The woman expects a lovely night filled with endless plates of samosas. Instead, she finds out her husband is having an affair with a woman named Maggie.
A short while after, her chest starts to ache. She walks into an examination room, where she finds out the pain in her breast isn’t just heartbreak—it’s cancer. She decides to call the tumor Maggie.
Unfolding in fragments over the course of the ensuing months, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar follows the narrator as she embarks on a journey of grief, healing, and reclamation. She starts talking to Maggie (the tumor), getting acquainted with her body’s new inhabitant. She overgenerously creates a “Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual” for Maggie (the other woman), hoping to ease the process of discovering her ex-husband’s whims and quirks. She turns her children’s bedtime stories into retellings of Chinese folklore passed down by her own mother, in an attempt to make them fall in love with their shared culture—and to maybe save herself in the process.
In the style of Jenny Offill and the tradition of Nora Ephron’s hilarious and devastating writing on heartbreak and womanhood, Maggie is a master class in transforming personal tragedy into a form of defiant comedy.
As a Navy brat, ROBERT YUNE moved 11 times by the time he turned 18. After graduating from Pitt, he lived in Pittsburgh for the next 15 years. In the summer of 2012, he worked as a stand-in for George Takei and has appeared as an extra in commercials and movies such as Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Fathers and Daughters. Yune’s fiction has been published in Green Mountains Review, The Kenyon Review, and Pleiades, among others. In 2009, he received a writing fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2015, his debut novel Eighty Days of Sunlight was nominated for the International DUBLIN Literary Award. His debut story collection Impossible Children won the Mary McCarthy Prize and was published by Sarabande Books. Yune serves on the board of Autumn House Press and lives in West Virginia.
KATIE YEE is a writer from Brooklyn. She has received fellowships from the Center for Fiction, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and Kundiman. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, No Tokens, The Believer, the Washington Square Review, Triangle House, Epiphany, and Literary Hub. By day, she works at the Brooklyn Museum. By night, she writes, usually under the watch of her judgmental rescue dog, Ollie.
The event runs from 7:00 to 8:00 pm and takes place in-person at the bookstore and online through a livestream. Registration for either can be completed online and the book is available for pre-order through White Whale Bookstore as well. The bookstore is located at 4754 Liberty Ave. in Bloomfield (map).
