Two Lines Press at Bay Area Book Festival 2025
Downtown Berkeley
Center for the Art of Translation is a proud sponsor of the 11th Annual Bay Area Book Festival, taking place May 31 & June 1 in downtown Berkeley. Visit Two Lines Press at the Bookworm Block Party and see Hon Lai Chu, author of Mending Bodies, and translator Jacqueline Leung on the Stories of Tomorrow panel.
June 1, 2025 | 11:00 am-5:00 pm
Bookworm Block Party
on and near Allston Way | Berkeley, CA
Come say hi to us at the Two Lines Press booth at the Bookworm Block Party! We’ll be at Booth 92.
More Info(opens in a new tab) | Festival Map(opens in a new tab)
June 1, 2025 | 12:30-1:15 pm
Stories of Tomorrow: Speculative Fiction
with Hon Lai Chu, Jacqueline Leung, Anita Felicelli, Marguerite Sheffer, moderated by Jane Ciabattari
Hotel Shattuck Plaza Crystal Ballroom | 2086 Allston Way | Berkeley, CA
Buckle up for a disorienting launch into the vast unknown with these works of speculative fiction that transcend time and space. How We Know Our Time Travelers is Anita Felicelli’s collection of dark, intellectual, and surreal stories that examine our post-pandemic reality and future, introducing characters such as a bickering couple who use an app to track their fights, a woman who discovers an unseen lodger in her home, and a group of creepy friends who sell jars of fog. The colorful cast of characters continues in Marguerite Sheffer’s The Man in the Banana Trees, with ghosts, aliens, an ice cream consultant who predicts a devastating new flavor trend, and a disgruntled New England waiter who investigates a mysterious tanker crash, diverse characters from the American Gulf South to the orbit around Jupiter who question whether what lurks at the edge of their perception is sinister or miraculous. For the young researcher protagonist resisting insidious pressure from her community in Mending Bodies, written by Hon Lai Chu and translated by Jacqueline Leung, her undoubtedly sinister world is governed by absurd socio-bureaucratic powers, and a new law that forces men and women to be surgically sewn together once they come of age leaves her desperate for ways to resist. Along with moderator Jane Ciabattari, the speculative authors of this panel will just skim the surface of the elusive atmospheric disturbances that fascinate and inspire them.
Book signing: Bandung Books, at the venue in the courtyard
Hon Lai Chu is one of Hong Kong’s most prominent writers and the author of several novels, including Mending Bodies, Degravitation Zone, and A Dictionary of Two Cities, co-authored with Dorothy Tse, which won the Hong Kong Book Prize. Her most recent works are Half-Eclipse and Darkness under the Sun, two diaristic essay collections about Hong Kong. She has also received accolades from Taiwan’s Unitas Literary Association, the Liang Shiu-chiu Literature Award, the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, and the Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature, among many others.
Jacqueline Leung is a writer and translator from Hong Kong. Her work has appeared in Wasafiri, Transtext(e)s Transcultures, Gulf Coast, Asymptote, Nashville Review, SAND Journal, the Asian Review of Books, Books From Taiwan, and elsewhere. She is a translator editor at The Offing. Her excerpt of Mending Bodies is a winner of PEN Presents by the English PEN. This is her first full-length translation.