Interior Chinatown, Tinseltown, and Other Worlds Imagined: Charles Yu on Showbiz and Storytelling, with Lodge 49’s Jim Gavin

When Trevor Noah of The Daily Show asked Charles Yu why he wrote his National Book Award-winning novel, the devastating “parable for outcasts” (Kirkus) Interior Chinatown, in the form of a screenplay, Yu deadpanned, “I work in Hollywood, so I already had the software.” A veteran of several TV series (including HBO’S Westworld), Yu honed his hilarious, convention-defying masterwork with an insider’s insight and an outlier’s genius. Yu found an oasis in the writer’s room of fellow novelist Jim Gavin’s (Middle Men) AMC cult-favorite series Lodge 49, an underdog’s hymn that channels Thomas Pynchon, counts Patton Oswalt and Tom Hanks as diehard fans, and “makes as good an argument for the existence of a kind of shabby everyday magic as you’ll find anywhere” (NPR).

Belly up to the bar and raise a drink with these two friends and fellow-travelers as they toast to creating worlds for page and screen, making the ordinary extraordinary, and finding strength—and hilarity—in difference and struggle.

Special opportunity

With a tax-deductible donation of $100 to the nonprofit Bay Area Book Festival, you can get a special invitation to a virtual afterparty with the author(s)! In an intimate, relaxed setting, you’ll have a chance to ask that crucial question there wasn’t enough time for in the live event Q&A; get a sense of what makes these original thinkers tick as people; or just let a writer whose work you love know, face to face, how much it’s meant to you.

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