Chang and Eng » (Reissue)

Darin Strauss is the author of the international bestseller Chang and Eng and the New York Times Notable Book The Real McCoy. Also a screenwriter, he is currently adapting Chang and Eng for the screen with Gary Oldman. Strauss teaches at New York University.

In this stunning debut novel, Darin Strauss combines fiction with astonishing fact to tell the story of history's most famous twins. Born in Siam in 1811-on a squalid houseboat on the Mekong River-Chang and Eng Bunker were international celebrities before the age of twenty. Touring the world's stages as a circus act, they settled in the American South just prior to the Civil War. They eventually married two sisters from North Carolina, fathering twenty-one children between them, and lived for more than six decades never more than seven inches apart, attached at the chest by a small band of skin and cartilage.

Woven from the fabric of fact, myth, and imagination, Strauss's narrative gives poignant, articulate voice to these legendary brothers and humanizes the freakish legend that grew up around them. Sweeping from the Far East and the court of the king of Siam to the shared intimacy of their lives in America, Chang and Eng rescues one of the nineteenth century's most fabled human oddities from the sideshow of history, drawing from their extraordinary lives a novel of exceptional power and beauty.

Author Biography: Darin Strauss is a graduate of the New York University creative writing program in fiction, where he was awarded a teaching fellowship. His articles have appeared in GQ and Time Out among other publications.

New Yorker

As lyrical as it is daring.