Nominated for a National Book Award last year for her first novel, When the Emporor Was Divine , the writer reads from her second, The Buddha in the Attic , about group of Japanese “picture brides” in the early-twentieth century.

A Match Made in Monochrome
“Picture brides” were so known because they traveled to the United States to marry men they had seen only in snapshots. Thousands of Japanese and Korean women came to America this way in the early 1900s.