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Lindsay Wong Hybrid Book Launch

Thursday Mar 02 2023 7:00 pm, Winnipeg, Grant Park in the Atrium, Streaming via YouTube
NOTE: This event has already taken place. Please visit this page to see our upcoming events.

Join Lindsay Wong for the launch of her new book Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality: Stories (Penguin Canada) featuring a reading, a conversation hosted by Jenny Heijun Wills, a Q&A, and a book signing.

The event will be hosted live in the Atrium of McNally Robinson Booksellers, Grant Park and also available as a simultaneous YouTube stream with live chat. Before arriving, please review details of how to attend physical events here at the store.

From the bestselling, Canada Reads-shortlisted author of The Woo-Woo comes a wild, darkly hilarious, and poignant collection of immigrant horror stories.

They’ll haunt and consume you—in strange and unsettling ways. Living forever isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. Hearts can still break, looks can still fade, and money still matters, even in eternity. The ghosts, zombies, and demons in this collection are all shockingly human, and they’re ready to spill their guts. Vanity, love, and tragedy are all candidly explored as the unfulfilled desires of the dead are echoed in the lives of modern-day immigrants. Story-by-story, the line between ghost and human, life and death, becomes increasingly blurred.

Lindsay Wong is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling memoir The Woo-Woo, which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2019. She has written a YA novel entitled My Summer of Love and Misfortune. Wong holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg.

Host Jenny Heijun Wills has lived, studied, and worked in Toronto, Montreal, Boston, and Seoul. She currently teaches at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba.

See:

Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality

- Lindsay Wong

Hardcover $32.95
Reader Reward Price: $29.66

From the bestselling, Canada Reads-shortlisted author of The Woo-Woo comes a wild, darkly hilarious, and poignant collection of immigrant horror stories. They'll haunt and consume you--in strange and unsettling ways.

Living forever isn't everything it's cracked up to be. Hearts can still break, looks can still fade, and money still matters, even in eternity. The ghosts, zombies, and demons in this collection are all shockingly human, and they're ready to spill their guts. Vanity, love, and tragedy are all candidly explored as the unfulfilled desires of the dead are echoed in the lives of modern-day immigrants. Story-by-story, the line between ghost and human, life and death, becomes increasingly blurred.

There's a courtesan from 17th century China who, try as she might, just can't manage to die. Grandmama Wu, who returns from the dead to protect her grandchildren from bullies. Not to mention an Internet-order bride who inadvertently brings the apocalypse to Nebraska City.

From Shanghai to Vancouver, the women in this collection haunt and are haunted--by first loves, troublesome family members, and traumatic memories. Intertwining horror, the supernatural, and mythology, Tell Me Pleasant Things about Immortality riotously critiques contemporary life and fearlessly illuminates the ways in which the past can devour us. A collection about transformation and what makes us human, it solidifies Lindsay Wong as one of the most vital and electrifying voices in Canadian literature today.

The Woo-Woo

- Lindsay Wong

Trade paperback $21.95
Reader Reward Price: $19.76

2019 CANADA READS FINALIST

Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction; Winner, Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize; Longlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour

In this jaw-dropping, darkly comedic memoir, a young woman comes of age in a dysfunctional Asian family who blame their woes on ghosts and demons when they should really be on anti-psychotic meds.

Lindsay Wong grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic grandmother and a mother who was deeply afraid of the "woo-woo" -- Chinese ghosts who come to visit in times of personal turmoil. From a young age, she witnessed the woo-woo's sinister effects; when she was six, Lindsay and her mother avoided the dead people haunting their house by hiding out in a mall food court, and on a camping trip, in an effort to rid her daughter of demons, her mother tried to light Lindsay's foot on fire.

The eccentricities take a dark turn, however, and when Lindsay starts to experience symptoms of the woo-woo herself, she wonders whether she will suffer the same fate as her family.

At once a witty and touching memoir about the Asian immigrant experience and a harrowing and honest depiction of the vagaries of mental illness, The Woo-Woo is a gut-wrenching and beguiling manual for surviving family, and oneself.

Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.

- Jenny Heijun Wills

Trade paperback $21.00
Reader Reward Price: $18.90

Winner of the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction

A beautiful and haunting memoir of kinship and culture rediscovered.


Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well as her Korean mother, father, siblings, and extended family. At the guesthouse for transnational adoptees where she lived, alliances were troubled by violence and fraught with the trauma of separation and of cultural illiteracy. Unsurprisingly, heartbreakingly, Wills found that her nascent relationships with her family were similarly fraught.

Ten years later, Wills sustains close ties with her Korean family. Her Korean parents and her younger sister attended her wedding in Montreal, and that same sister now lives in Canada. Remarkably, meeting Jenny caused her birth parents to reunite after having been estranged since her adoption. Little by little, Jenny Heijun Wills is learning and relearning her stories and those of her biological kin, piecing together a fragmented life into something resembling a whole.

Delving into gender, class, racial, and ethnic complexities, as well as into the complex relationships between Korean women--sisters, mothers and daughters, grandmothers and grandchildren, aunts and nieces--Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. describes in visceral, lyrical prose the painful ripple effects that follow a child's removal from a family, and the rewards that can flow from both struggle and forgiveness.