Her entry begins:The book that I want to talk about is one that I read kind of by accident. I mean I bought the book. But that was at one of those airport bookstore kiosks when I was on the run last fall. How Tracy Kidder’s beautiful, resonant stories even end up at LaGuardia is a mystery to me but there was one Strength in What Remains and I grabbed it because Borders was having a two for one book sale. It’s not that I didn’t want to read Strength in What Remains. I love just about anything Kidder writes.Among the early praise for The Foremost Good Fortune:
It’s that I knew the book would ask something of me and I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to deliver. I’d just finished writing The Foremost Good Fortune — a memoir about living in China and getting cancer, and my head was full of white noise: book tour logistics and how to register for a Facebook account. So I sat in the blue bucket seat at Gate 23B and...[read on]
“You hear about riveting prose, and this is it. The story is nailed down, noisily, in metal. The Foremost Good Fortune is just about as honest a book as you’ll ever read. The trip Conley went on was to a far more complex place that she envisioned. This is a beautiful book about China and cancer and how to be an authentic, courageous human being.”Learn more about the book and author at Susan Conley's website and blog.
--Carolyn See, Washington Post
"[A] luminous memoir..."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Beautifully written and insightful on many levels.”
--Booklist
“Conley lived in China from 2007 to 2009, witnessing the buildup to the Olympics, the election of Barack Obama, and the explosion of capitalism against a background of communism and corruption. Her running account of the profound strangeness of both expat existence and contemporary China is fascinating.
--Rebecca Steinitz, Boston Globe
Writers Read: Susan Conley.
--Marshal Zeringue
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