Love Love
Authors: Sung J. Woo
PRAISE FOR
LOVE LOVE
“You will love
Love Love
. Like Kevin on the tennis court, Sung J. Woo marries brute force with clever misdirection; brilliant flourishes with measured restraint; craft with strategy. The result is a gem of a novel, by turns poignant, heartbreaking and wickedly funny. The only dangling thread: when's the film adaptation coming out?”
â
JON WERTHEIM
,
Sports Illustrated
executive editor and author of
Strokes of Genius: Federer, Nadal, and the Greatest Match Ever Played
“With antic humor and boundless sympathy, Sung J. Woo gives his broken characters something to reach for.
Love Love
is an ace.”
â
ED PARK
,
author of
Personal Days
“
Love Love
is sad and funny and full of absolutely brilliant writing.”
â
STEWART O
'
NAN
,
bestselling author of
West of Sunset
and
The Odds
“Sung J. Woo's
Love Love
is a wonderful readâfunny, tender, touching, and true. This is the novel about tennis, porn, art, and family that the world has been waiting for.”
â
ALIX OHLIN
,
author of
Signs and Wonders and Inside
“Sung J. Woo has written a surprising, moving novel that powerfully explores notions of family, creativity, skill, andâyesâlove.”
â
LOUISA THOMAS
,
staff writer at
Grantland
and author of
Conscience: Two Soldiers,
Two Pacifists, One Familyâa Test of Will and Faith in World War
“This tale of unconventional love in unconventional families is funny, knowing, and always surprising.
Love Love
has got it all: tennis, of course, but also organized crime, pornography, a venomous snake, and more twists than a bag of Rold Golds. Give it half a chance and it will charm the terry-cloth headband off you.”
â
J. ROBERT LENNON
,
author of
Familiar
and
See You in Paradise
PRAISE FOR
EVERYTHING ASIAN
“Full of wit, humor and heart, the book succinctly captures the struggle of an immigrant child trying to fit into American societyâand in his own dysfunctional family.”
â
Chicago Sun-Times
“A novel that both delights and instructs.”
â
Kirkus
, starred review
“There's a certain genius inherent in choosing a strip mall as a 1980s period setting, and Woo makes the most of it, filling the book with the way customers' and neighboring storeowners' lives touchâsometimes only glancinglyâon the three Kims' first year in America. . . . Woo has cleverly constructed a central narrative that runs like a Venn diagram through the tour of Peddlers Town.”
â
Christian Science Monitor
Copyright © 2015 Sung J. Woo
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Woo, Sung J.
Love love: a novel / Sung J. Woo.
pages cm
1.
 Â
Single womenâFiction. 2.
 Â
Single menâFiction. 3.
 Â
Adopted childrenâFiction. 4.
 Â
Brothers and sistersâFiction. 5.
 Â
KoreansâFiction.
I. Title.
PS3623.O6225L68 2015
813'.6âdc23
2015009333
Jacket design by Jennifer Heuer
Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates
Soft Skull Press
An Imprint of COUNTERPOINT
2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318
Berkeley, CA 94710
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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e-book ISBN 978-1-61902-675-9
for Dawn
Contents
Part III: Three Days in November
“Love is something eternalâthe aspect may change, but not the essence.”
âV
INCENT VAN
G
OGH
“Love is nothing in tennis, but in life, it's everything.”
âA
NONYMOUS
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