The Hanging on Union Square

Originally self-published in 1935, H.T. Tsiang’s satiric, experimental, proletarian novel The Hanging in Union Square explores leftist politics in Depression-era New York in an ambitious style that combines satirical allegory with snatches of poetry, newspaper quotations, non-sequiturs, and slogans, as well as elements of classical and contemporary Chinese literature. The novel follows a young man throughout a single day that takes him from a worker’s cafeteria to dinner clubs and sexual exploitation in the highest echelons of society, then back again to the streets of NYC, where starving families rub shoulders with the recently evicted. Adventurous and unclassifiable in its combination of avant-garde and proletarian concerns, The Hanging in Union Square is a major rediscovery of a uniquely American voice.

Please join us for a celebration and series of brief readings from the book by Floyd Cheung, Hua Hsu, Jennifer Hayashida, Soomi Kim, Sunyoung Lee, Nicky Paraiso, and Ken Chen.

Please RSVP at www.apa.nyu.edu/events by Tuesday, March 26, 2013.

Co-sponsored by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Asian American Arts Alliance, and Museum of Chinese in America.