Named a Best Book of 2018 by New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Publisher's Weekly, NPR, and Time, among many others, this essay collection from the author of The Queen of the Night explores how we form identities in life and in art.
As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as "masterful" by Roxane Gay, "incendiary" by the New York Times, and "brilliant" by the Washington Post. With his first collection of nonfiction, he's sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author's manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how lessons on the writing life learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and in this powerful work of queer literature, reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation's history, including his father's death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing--Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley--the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump.
By turns commanding, heartbreaking, and wry, the literary nonfiction in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel asks questions about how we create ourselves in life and in art, and how to fight when our dearest truths are under attack.
- The Writing Craft: Go inside the mind of a writer as he grows from student to teacher, exploring the entangling of life, literature, and politics.
- A Queer Coming of Age: A candid and intimate memoir of reckoning with identity as a son, a lover, a friend, and a gay, Korean American man in modern America.
- Activism and the AIDS Crisis: Chronicles some of the most formative experiences of a generation, from the front lines of the AIDS crisis to the aftermath of 9/11 and the election of Donald Trump.
- On Identity and Inheritance: Examines the search for self through the eclectic jobs that supported his art--from Tarot-reading and bookselling to cater-waiting for William F. Buckley.
About the Author :
ALEXANDER CHEE is a novelist and essayist and an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at The Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic at large at The Los Angeles Times.
Review :
Praise for How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Named a Best Book by: TIME, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Wired, Esquire, Buzzfeed, New York Public Library, Boston Globe, The Paris Review, Mother Jones, The A.V. Club, Out Magazine, Book Riot, Electric Literature, PopSugar, The Rumpus, My Republica, Paste, Bitch, Library Journal, Flavorwire, Bustle, Christian Science Monitor, Shelf Awareness, Tor.com, Entertainment Cheat Sheet, Roads and Kingdoms, Chicago Public Library, Hyphen Magazine, Entropy Magazine, The Chicago Review of Books, The Coil, iBooks, and Washington Independent Review of Books Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction Recipient of the Lambda Literary Trustees' Award Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in Nonfiction Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction One of Min Jin Lee's Summer Reads in the Washington Post One of Curtis Sittenfeld's Summer Reads in the Guardian A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of 2018 "Alexander Chee is one of the best living writers of today. If he's not already a household name, he needs to be...powerful, powerful essays with powerful, powerful words..." --Buzzfeed's Isaac Fitzgerald, on NBC's TODAY "If writing, too, is a form of drag for Chee, it is also an act of mystic invocation and transference...Chee leavens his heaviest topics--the decimation of the gay community in the late 1980s and early '90s, the repressed memory of sexual abuse that inspired Edinburgh--with charming episodes like his stint as a waiter at William and Pat Buckley's Park Avenue maisonette, a job that prompted a crisis of conscience given Buckley's infamous proposal to brand AIDS patients on their wrists and buttocks...Even at his most mystical, Chee is generous; these pieces are personal, never pedagogical. They bespeak an unguarded sincerity and curiosity. Chee is refreshingly open about his sometimes liberating, sometimes claustrophobic sense of exceptionality...He reminds us that whomever a writer pictures as his audience, he is also writing into absence, standing in testimony for the sake of the dead. Like most of the essays here, 'After Peter' pulses with urgency, one piece from a life in restless motion. It is not necessary to agree that How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is itself a kind of novel in order to appreciate that Chee has written a moving and personal tribute to impermanence, a wise and transgressive meditation on a life lived both because of and in spite of America, a place where, he writes, you are allowed to speak the truth as long as nothing changes.'" --New York Times Book Review "Two-thirds of the way through Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, I abandoned my sharpened reviewer's pencil in favor of luxuriating in the words. Chee's writing has a mesmerizing quality; his sentences are rife with profound truths without lapsing into the didactic...Chee is a very special artist; his writing is lyrical and accessible, whimsical and sad, often all at the same time. No doubt he is an inspiring writing teacher as well. His views on writing reflect his own, thoughtfully examined life." --NPR "As Chee's gaze turns inward, he beckons readers to experience his private moments with such clarity and honesty that we're immediately brought into his consciousness. At the same time, he asks us to contemplate the largest questions about identity, sexuality, family, art and war...[A] trailblazing collection...By the end of this moving collection, we learn through Chee's experiences that to be a writer is to continuously reconsider the self, to find what drives you even in moments of despair." --Washington Post "Alexander Chee's marvel of a collection opens with the sting of clarity...The 16 essays that knit together his profound and resonant collection are a nimble study in radical self-invention...The revelations that follow crackle with the same glowing, essential truths." --Wired "Chee's insights about writing, love and activism are hard-won, honest and incredibly wise." --Curtis Sittenfeld, Guardian "The latest brilliant fiction writer to publish a new essay collection this year...Alexander Chee proves why he's a master of the form. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel meditates on how art shapes who we are, unpacking its author's own coming-of-age as a gay Korean man to craft persuasive, engrossing arguments." --Entertainment Weekly "As profound as they are beautiful, Chee's essays impart wisdom from a life fully lived, and speak to what it means to be a writer and reader in contemporary times." --Buzzfeed "Alexander Chee published Edinburgh, a singularly beautiful and psychologically harrowing first book that still stands as one of the best American novels of this century. Now, he's published How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, a first book of essays that is just as good, and almost as singular, as his novelistic debut...How good is How to Write an Autobiographical Novel? It's so good that I could fill my word count just with quotations...one of its beauties is how simultaneously shaped and flexible it is, both thematically coherent and varied in subject matter...Chee's particular style of mind and habits of moral engagement hold the collection together; every essay, no matter the subject, exhibits warmth, rigor, tact...The mask conceals and it reveals; writing transfigures and it uncovers. That's the gift that writing has given Chee, and it's the gift that his wonderful new collection gives its readers." --The Boston Globe "A searing examination of the costs of writing...achingly vulnerable." --Vox "A deeply probing exploration of being a writer, an activist, gay, and half-Korean all at once. Hewing to his own advice as a teacher, he places no limits on the questions he asks of himself and of the reader, which feel at once overwhelmingly intimate but strikingly universal...How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is filled with the uncertainty that comes with feeling your sense of self forming. It is, at once, a memoir and a survival guide for being your most authentic self." --Mother Jones "A knowing and luminous self-portrait." --O, the Oprah Magazine "Chee's essays convey the effect of new forms being invented before your eyes. His book is a fragmented portrait of the young artist donning and shedding various masks. Chee makes use of conventional vehicles &m
