Dispatches from the Cold

Dispatches from the Cold . Seattle, WA: Black Heron Press (Summer 1998).
Winner of a San Francisco Bay Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery ("Goldie") Award.

A young man in New York begins opening and reading misdirected letters from a man named Farrel Gorden in New Hampshire. Gorden, a working-class white man who violently hates his new Korean American boss, is on the verge of losing control. As we watch the young man, amidst his own crises, reconstuct Gorden's world, the paths of these two disparate characters soon come crashing together as the young man tries to interfere with Gorden's life.

Read a note and excerpt.

Also available in paperback.

Praise for Dispatches from the Cold

"Chang narrates his passionate, downbeat tale with naturalistic distance and an authentic, even microscopic grasp of the...dead-end world Farrel [Gorden] inhabits...Chang is an exceptionally talented writer..."
-- Kirkus Reviews

"Chang's gift for unsentimental storytelling is indisputable..."
-- Library Journal

"In his provocative second novel, Chang deftly varies a formula used by Hitchcock in REAR WINDOW: a man in a position of enforced idleness becomes obsessed with the activities of a total stranger...In clean and vernacular-accurate prose, Chang painstakingly evokes the working-class lives of both characters, as well as their ethnic prejudices and misunderstandings. The deliberately slow pace of the narrative accentuates the impact of the step-by-step account of Gorden's descent into murderous rage, building to the narrator's disastrous intervention. In the end, the trajectory of both their lives acquires an air of tragic inevitability."
-- Publishers Weekly

"...Chang's pacing hums. He possesses a master storyteller's sense of timing and economy."
-- The San Francisco Bay Guardian

"With stark and spare prose that sets off handsomely the complex narrative structure, Leonard Chang's brave new novel deftly showcases a compelling drama set against the backdrop of a blue-collar New England... In this richly imaginative novel, what is most refreshing is how very ordinary Chang's Korean characters are in the sense that their character development is not confined to their ethnicity... They are fully realized, and thus their entanglement with Farrel Gorden is all the more powerful and relevant. Truly, Chang must be commended for daring to step outside the conventional themes that plague popular Asian American literature...a powerful and complex novel..."
-- KoreAm Journal

"Gorden's maniacal rampage revolves around a fine axis of twisted emotions, the irrationality of which only draws the reader in. Chang's second release is a rich geometry that keeps your pulse from getting too sluggish."
-- A. Magazine

"...Attention to narrative craft and subtleties of community and character help Chang's work stand out from higher-profile market clutter and glutter. Chang's novels are remarkable for their ensemble play and the meticulousness with which volatile situations are imagined. Dispatches from the Cold doesn't foreground race but weaves it into a complex, larger narrative and social fabric. The result is a reality that's recognizable but sorely missing in fiction."
-- The San Francisco Bay Guardian Outstanding Local Discovery Award ("Goldie") Citation

Available at your bookstore, or order from Amazon.com