Beginning of the East

"[Max Yeh] is a writer on the rampage, but his appetite is for history, for political meaning, for ethical life ? He imagines America back to Columbus and forward again, mapping his own brain, and possibly ours?" -E.L. Doctorow Made available again by Kaya Press for the first time in decades, The Beginning of the East is an audacious, high-wire grappling with the world-making powers of the literary imagination as filtered through the experiences of an American scholar of Chinese descent and his attempt to map out the impact of Columbus' "aberrations, delusions and fantasies" on the brutality and political posturing of the American present. Having uprooted himself and his family from California to Mexico City, the narrator is even more radically unmoored when an earthquake forces him into an acute awareness of the physicality of experience. This dazzling tapestry of stories travels east to a mythic Cathay and west to the New World, sliding between points of view and time periods to demonstrate what can be wrought by the imagination. Max Yeh is the author of a trilogy of novels: The Beginning of the East (1992), Stolen Oranges (2017) and Ramblings in the West: Footnotes (2025).