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    How To Write An Autobiographical Novel: Essays
    How To Write An Autobiographical Novel: Essays
    How To Write An Autobiographical Novel: Essays
    Ebook293 pages6 hours

    How To Write An Autobiographical Novel: Essays

    By Alexander Chee

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    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 the lessons 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 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, 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.

    Named a Best Book by: Time, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Wired, Esquire, Buzzfeed, New York Public Library, Boston Globe, 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, 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 a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateApr 17, 2018
    ISBN9781328764416
    How To Write An Autobiographical Novel: Essays
    Author

    Alexander Chee

    ALEXANDER CHEE is the best-selling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh, and the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, and an editor at large at Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, T Magazine, Slate, Vulture, among others. He is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College.

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    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      Collection of essays that pertain to life, identity, and writing. Notwithstanding the title, this book is not a traditional “how to” book about writing. It is more about finding an authentic voice, and how the events in Chee’s life shaped him as a writer. He writes about significant experiences (such as his Korean American heritage, the death of his father when he was sixteen, his involvement in gay activism) and how these have influenced his development as an author. There are some beautiful and moving pieces here. I particularly appreciated his essays about tending a rose garden and how he used his own childhood trauma as the foundation for his first novel. Chee is a talented writer, and these essays were a pleasure to read.“The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do.”
    • 4/5
      This isn't the book I thought it would be when I picked it up and got it from the Hershey Library; but it was the book that it needed to be, and the book I was glad it was once I was done reading it.

      I've never read any of Alexander Chee's other works. Will I now? Probably, but not guaranteed. But this was an important and terrific collection of essays. And definitely one that any aspiring writer needs to read. Any level of aspiring, and even actual published, writer should read this at some point. Its poignant, intelligent, knowledgeable, and understanding. Like a pat on the back or shoulder, saying "I understand you" and "I am here for you". Which, at most times, is what the writer needs most, and craves the most, and in a lot of cases, is why they write in the first place.
    • 5/5
      A powerful collection of essays by an incredible writer, about everything from writing to roses, to surviving.
    • 5/5
      Beautiful and consoling. Esp like what he says about fiction being freeing, truth not, and meaning-making, why we write, to bridge author and reader. memorable chapter about roses. beautiful writing.
    • 5/5
      This is gorgeous. I read this so slowly because every word mattered. Obviously this is not a how-to book in any traditional sense, though Chee shares a great deal about the writing process, and the power of word well wielded. He also shares words of wisdom learned from his lineup of mentors. Marilynne Robinson, Annie Dillard, Deborah Eisenberg ( what a bench!) But though this is not a how-to it is in fact primer on why to write and how to live. Not how to live to be well and happy and unscathed. Chee is very much not unscathed. But a writer needs to truly live in order to be able to impart anything of value, and Chee has lived. This is a personal and political coming of age story of a Gay Korean-American boy, touched by betrayal, the loss of a parent, wealth and poverty and wealth, and the end of wealth. He uses all of those things, and a boatload of very hard work, to write as he does. In the end Chee focuses less on the how and more on the why, and if you can answer the why you are pretty much invincible. I don't know what to say except this is SO GOOD.
    • 4/5
      This was slow to engage me but once it did I was all the way in. The unexpected overlaps of biography (our involvements in ACT UP, for one) were a poignant pleasure.
    • 4/5
      A beautifully written collection of essays about writing and so much more. "The Rosary," about the author's Brooklyn garden, was a particular favorite.
    • 5/5
      A very special personal book of essays the sum of which relates the journey of the person and how it informs him as he struggles to create his art, in this case, writing.

    Book preview

    How To Write An Autobiographical Novel - Alexander Chee

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