A stunningly original writer and translator, Jung has won Korea’s most prestigious literary awards for his fiction and has rendered some forty books from English into Korean, including works by John Fowles and Raymond Carver. He follows his mesmerizing novels Vaseline Buddha and The Contrived World with a form-bending book transforming his experience at the international writers’ residency, 100W Corsicana, into a kaleidoscopic novel of ideas. Written with his trademark absurdist humor, the narrative follows an outsider’s efforts to understand his temporary Texas home, asking questions like, “Can beans be in chili? Was Jack Ruby a performance artist? Did Karl Marx want to be a cowboy?” Jung will be in conversation with Martha Anne Toll, a regular book critic for NPR.