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How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays Audiobook
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Publisher Description
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-wailing 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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“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
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“A knowing and luminous self-portrait.”
— O, The Oprah Magazine -
“Chee’s insights about writing, love, and activism are hard won, honest, and incredibly wise.”
— The Guardian (London) -
“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 -
“Chee is able to write about himself and, by extension, about all of us.”
— Esquire -
“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 -
“He beckons readers to experience his private moments with such clarity and honesty that we’re immediately brought into his consciousness.”
— Washington Post -
“Every essay, no matter the subject, exhibits warmth, rigor, tact.”
— Boston Globe -
“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 -
“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 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
Awards
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A BookRiot Pick of Books to Read If You Love "Pose"
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An Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year (So Far)
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A Chicago Review of Books Pick of Best of the Year (So Far)
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A Buzzfeed Best Books of the Year (So Far)
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A Wired Magazine Pick of Must-Read Summer Titles
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An Esquire Magazine Pick of Best Books of 2018 (So Far)
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A Christian Science Monitor selection of 2018's Most Anticipated Books
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A Bustle Pick of Most Anticipated Books of 2018
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A Bitch magazine pick of Most Anticipated Nonfiction for 2018
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A Pop Sugar Pick of Most Anticipated Upcoming Books
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A Paste Magazine Pick of Best Memoirs of the Decade
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A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018
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A Time Magazine Best Book of 2018 in Nonfiction
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A Library Journal Best Books of the Year selection
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A Vulture.com Pick of One of Ten Best Books of 2018
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A them selection of Top 10 Best Queer Books of 2018
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Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography
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Winner of the 2019 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
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Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay
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A Los Angeles Review of Books Pick for a Rainbow Pride Reading List
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Nominated for a 2019 Voice Arts Award
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel Listener Reviews
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4/22/2021
About 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.
About Daniel K. Isaac
Daniel K. Isaac was born on December 5, 1988 in Fullerton, California. He is an actor and writer, known for Billions, Money Monster, and Too Big to Fail.