Welcome to author Don Lee's official website. Don's new novel, Wrack and Ruin, has just been published by W.W. Norton. His first novel, Country of Origin, was released by Norton in July 2004. Yellow, his first book, a collection of short stories, was published by Norton in 2001.

• Recently Don accepted an appointment to teach in Western Michigan University's graduate creative writing program in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He will begin at WMU in the fall.

• Dates for readings of Wrack and Ruin are up on Appearances. 

• Don's new novel, Wrack and Ruin, is about two brothers, one a sculptor/farmer, the other a movie producer/charlatan, and it revisits the town of Rosarita Bay, California, that was portrayed in Yellow. An excerpt of the first chapter appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of American Short Fiction.

• Wrack and Ruin is designed to be a farce, which is defined as:
  
  From Latin: farcire, “to stuff”; any work which evokes laughter by such devices of low comedy as physical buffoonery, rough wit, or the creation of ridiculous situations, and which is little concerned with subtlety of characterization or probability of plot, e.g., Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors.  —Literary Terms
  
  Farce is usually considered to be a boisterous comedy involving ludicrous action and dialogue which is intended to excite laughter through exaggeration and extravagance rather than by a realistic imitation of life. It contains exaggerated physical action which is often repeated, exaggeration of character and situation, absurd situations, and surprises in the form of unexpected appearances and disclosures. The characters and dialogue are almost always subservient to the plot and situation which are so complex that the events happen with bewildering rapidity.  —Glossary of Literary Terms