Beauty Plus Pity

"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).