HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL
From the author of The Queen of the Night, 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, “incomparable” by Junot Díaz, and “incendiary” by the New York Times. With How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, 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,
From the author of The Queen of the Night, 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, “incomparable” by Junot Díaz, and “incendiary” by the New York Times. With How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, 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.
- Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Paperback
- April 2018
- 288 Pages
- 9781328764522
Buy the Book
$15.99
About Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee is the best-selling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh. 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.
Praise
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2018 by Esquire, Book Riot, PopSugar, The Rumpus, My Republica, Paste, Bustle, Christian Science Monitor, and Buzzfeed
Named a Most Anticipated Nonfiction Title of 2018 by Bitch
Named a Top 10 Essay Collection of Spring 2018 by Publishers Weekly
Named a Most Anticipated April Book by EW, Book Riot, Bitch, and The Coil
“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
“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
“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