In partnership with The Serica Initiative, join us for a conversation with Yiming Ma, MBA 2018, author of These Memories Do Not Belong to Us, moderated by New York Times-bestselling author Omar El Akkad. For fans of Cloud Atlas and The Power, Ma’s novel is a hauntingly beautiful and prescient debut set in a future where a renamed China is the sole global superpower.
What the critics say:
"Mesmerizing. A deeply felt and meticulously crafted novel that entrances the reader from the first sentence to its last." —JASON MOTT, National Book Award-winning author of Hell of a Book
"This isn't just a novel. It's a revolutionary experiment in how our memories and histories can save us. By turns heartbreaking and eerily prescient, Ma's ambitious debut breaks open the hidden parts of us and scatters them across the night sky for you to discover." —SEQUOIA NAGAMATSU, author of How High We Go in the Dark
"Chilling, poignant, and uncomfortably timely, Ma's braided memory dispatches explore a future in which the shifting concepts of safety, loyalty, and truth lead nowhere except condemnation." —TESSA HULLS, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Feeding Ghosts
About the Presenters
Yiming Ma holds an MBA from Stanford and an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was the Carol Houck Smith Scholar. His stories and essays appear in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. Born in Shanghai, he now lives between Toronto, New York, and Seattle.
Omar El Akkad is an author and journalist. His fiction and non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. His second novel, What Strange Paradise, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and was shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. It was also named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR and several other publications. His new nonfiction book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, is an instant New York Times bestseller. Omar lives near Portland, Oregon, where is on the faculty of the Pacific University MFA in Writing program.