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About The Forest for the Trees

A dark comedy about a clash of cultures and generations, a biracial coming-of-age story, and a psychological thriller about inherited trauma from an award-winning writer and début filmmaker. The year: 1959. The place: suburban New York City. When Chinese businessman Leo Lin loses his livelihood, his Caucasian American wife Margaret replaces him as sole breadwinner, creating a cascade of domestic crises that mirrors the Cold War raging between the United States and Communist China. Their oldest daughter Prudence elopes. Denise, the middle daughter, escapes into French literature and her prophetic imagination. Lorraine, the youngest, takes refuge in the Catholic Church and the Mickey Mouse Club. But it is when Leo’s fresh off the boat mother Nai-nai comes to live with them that the family unit threatens to rupture. The final blow is delivered by Leo’s imperious father Guoxin who reveals a terrible secret that has kept him prisoner of his past and all the Lins hostage to his unremitting sense of guilt and shame. The Forest for the Trees alternates between chapters of a novel and scenes of its adaptation as a screenplay, offering the reader a hybrid experience as well as a liminal approach to understanding the book’s all-too-human characters torn between family duty and personal desire.

About Leslie Li

Winner of the 2023 Big Moose Prize for her hybrid novel The Forest for the Trees published by Black Lawrence Press, Leslie Li is also the author of the novel Bittersweet; the culinary memoir Daughter of Heaven; and Just Us Girls, the companion book to her feature-length documentary The Kim Loo Sisters. Her personal essays and feature articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, Travel & Leisure, Condé Nast's Traveler, Gourmet, Saveur, Modern Maturity, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, and elsewhere. Her awards include a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction and grants from New York State Council for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Chinese Heritage Foundation. Bittersweet and Daughter of Heaven have been translated into five languages. She lives in New York and spends as much time as she can in Bali, Indonesia.