Beauty Plus Pity — Kevin Chong

"Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art."
-- Vladimir Nabokov

In this tragicomic, modern immigrant's tale, Malcolm Kwan is a twentysomething Asian American embarking on a modeling career whose life is derailed when his father dies and his fiancée leaves him. When he meets the half-sister he never knew existed -- the result of his father's extramarital affair -- he must work through his lifelong ambivalence as one trapped between two cultures and between two parents holding intolerable secrets.

Kevin Chong is the author of the novel Baroque-a-Nova (Plume) and the memoir Neil Young Nation (Greystone Books).