Lisa Brackmann

Lisa Brackmann's latest novel is Dragon Day.

From her Q & A with Steph Cha for the Los Angeles Review of Books:

STEPH CHA: I love how you open the book with an immediate commentary on the heavy use of dragons in media about China. How do you see your books fitting into the broad category of literature about China?

LISA BRACKMANN: Well, first a confession: Dragon Day was my working title. It fit with the vague Chinese astrology theme I had going on: there really are Dragon Days and Sheep Days and every-other-sign-of-the-Chinese-zodiac days, and you think about a day ruled by the most powerful and charismatic sign, Dragon, and it sort of fit the theme of the book. But I was embarrassed to actually use “dragon” in a title, because as Ellie puts it, “It’s such a fucking cliché,” and I feel like a part of what I’m trying to do in this series is to talk about China in a way that might not be familiar to a lot of Western readers — and by that, I mean the China of today and the China I’ve experienced over the last few decades. One of the reasons that I wrote the first book in the series was that I hadn’t seen modern China portrayed all that often in American fiction. I wanted to talk about what China is like now. China is really important in the world that we’re living in, and it’s easy to construct some sort of abstract, idealized (whether for good or for ill) image of it. I am not an expert on all things China by any stretch, but...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Lisa Brackmann's website and blog.

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