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How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee audiobook

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays

By Alexander Chee
Read by Daniel K. Isaac

Blackstone Publishing 9781328764522
8.48 Hours • 1
Format : CD (In Stock)
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    ISBN: 9781982597023

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An essay collection exploring his education as a man, writer, and activist—and how we form our 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 How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, his first collection of nonfiction, he is 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.

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Summary

Summary

A Time Magazine Best Book of 2018 in Nonfiction

Winner of the 2019 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction

Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography

Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

Nominated for a 2019 Voice Arts Award

An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year (So Far)

An Esquire Magazine Pick of Best Books of 2018 (So Far)

A Chicago Review of Books Pick of Best of the Year (So Far)

A Buzzfeed Best Books of the Year (So Far)

A Vulture.com Pick of One of Ten Best Books of 2018

A Library Journal Best Books of the Year selection

A Los Angeles Review of Books Pick for a Rainbow Pride Reading List

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018

A Wired Magazine Pick of Must-Read Summer Titles

A Paste Magazine Pick of Best Memoirs of the Decade

A Christian Science Monitor selection of 2018's Most Anticipated Books

A BookRiot Pick of Books to Read If You Love "Pose"

A them selection of Top 10 Best Queer Books of 2018

A Bustle Pick of Most Anticipated Books of 2018

A Bitch magazine pick of Most Anticipated Nonfiction for 2018

A Pop Sugar Pick of Most Anticipated Upcoming Books

An essay collection exploring his education as a man, writer, and activist—and how we form our 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 How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, his first collection of nonfiction, he is 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.

Editorial Reviews

Editorial Reviews

“A knowing and luminous self-portrait.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“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
“The sixteen 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
“A searing examination of the costs of writing.” —Vox
“The collection is candid, recursive, and well matched to narrator Daniel K. Isaac’s understated sincerity. From moments of wry humor to shattering honesty, Isaac carries listeners through with sophisticated equanimity, underscoring the sense of intimacy created by Chee’s words.” —AudioFile
“Alexander Chee explores the realm of the real with extraordinarily beautiful essays. Being real here is an ambition, a haunting, an impossibility, and an illusion. What passes for real, his essays suggest, becomes real, just as life becomes art, and art, pursued this fully, becomes a life.” —Eula Biss, author of On Immunity
“Alexander Chee is one of our most important writers and we should listen to every damn thing he has to say.” —Jami Attenberg, author of All Grown Up
“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
“Chee’s insights about writing, love, and activism are hard won, honest, and incredibly wise.” —Guardian (London)
“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.” —Washington Post
“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.” — Boston Globe
“Chee remains introspective and self-reflective without arrogance…Chee is able to write about himself and, by extension, about all of us.” —Esquire
“An absolute gift of a book for writers everywhere. Every single essay is a pearl.” —Chicago Review of Books
“Chee’s writing has a mesmerizing quality; his sentences are rife with profound truths without lapsing into the didactic.” —NPR
“His essays are an invitation not to review the rules of writing but to trace a unique pathway into knowledge and being in and through writing.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

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Author

Author Bio: Alexander Chee

Author Bio: Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh and the acclaimed essay collection How to Write An Autobiographical Novel. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, an editor-at-large at Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic-at-large at the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Guernica, and Tin House, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College.

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Details

Details

Available Formats : CD, MP3 CD
Category: Nonfiction/Literary Collections
Runtime: 8.48
Audience: Adult
Language: English

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