Distance & Desire

PRESS RELEASE

Distance and Desire

the new novel from IMANTS KINS

Is to be Published by Emergence Education Press, January 2023 ISBN-10: 1954642126ISBN-13: 978- 1954642126

It is now Available through Amazon.com

“A story that shows how human intimacy transcends cultural difference.”

Philadelphia, PA, — Today’s media tends to present America and China as utterly incompatible cultures, but this new novel by Imants Kins shows how human intimacy is the bridge that can unite people across cultural divides by transcending stereotypes and historical animosities.

It’s 2013 and China is a world super power. The life of middle-aged businessman New Yorker Jimmy Baker looks great. While happily married to Hillary, an art gallery director, he harbours a long-kept secret. An unexpected business trip to secure ancient landscape paintings in Beijing changes all that. A series of events is unleashed that he could never have imagined. Back in New York paper planes pursue him and he overhears a conversation between Marilyn Monroe and Andy Warhol in the St. Vincent Ferrer church.

The story revolves around the lives of four New Yorkers and three Chinese. As the different levels of human intimacy emerge between them, the novel brings to life a surprising intimacy between Jimmy and a young Chinese woman named Ai Song. The two meet for five days in Beijing during the sale of ancient Chinese landscape paintings and their intimacy evolves over the next seventy seven days while their immediate life around them dramatically intensifies.

Cultural differences quickly fall away as the power of human Intimacy brings Jimmy and Ai into contact with their own humanity and each other’s. They connect profoundly by learning to understand the places they come from. For Jimmy this means New York, the ‘City of Possibility’, and for Ai, it’s the mountains of Chengdu, which for her are the soul of China. Both locations become living characters in the story and as the relationship between Jimmy and Ai deepens, they experience a sense of wholeness that is free from existential angst.

While Jimmy rejoices in New York’s jazz music and the ideal of the American dream, Ai treasures the landscapes, ancient beliefs and living history of China. The intimacy between Jimmy and Ai reveals how the cultures of China and America, although different, are compatible and in unexpected ways complimentary.