Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Monday 29 April
6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
‘Novels are accidents at their start,’ Alexander Chee has written. What causes these productive accidents? Who do they happen to? And what do novels become next?
Chee, the author of two masterful, award-winning novels – and a distinguished teacher, essayist and critic – has given a lot of thought to these questions. His acclaimed, reflexive autobiographical first novel, Edinburgh, was about a Korean-American boy from Maine. His second book, The Queen of the Night, was a radical departure – about a 19th-century opera singer in France.
His third book, How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, is a work of memoir – a collection of engrossing essays about Chee’s own life and about the mysterious alchemy behind full-length works of fiction. These essays describe episodes from the author’s own life, from the traumatic childhood events that fed directly into the writing of Edinburgh, to his AIDS activism in the nineties and his time at Iowa Writers’ Workshop. It’s a profound, enigmatic and charming book; a highly distinctive reflection on memory, identity and creativity.
A revered ‘writer’s writer’, a tireless champion of other authors, and a blazing talent in his own right, Chee will talk writing and life at the Athenaeum Theatre.
Sun Bookshop will be our bookseller for this event.
Featuring
Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee is the bestselling 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.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is an essay collection exploring his education as a man, writer, and activist — and how we form our identities in life and in art. It was named a Best Book of 2018 by Publisher’s Weekly, Time Magazine, New York Magazine and the Washington Post, among others. As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as 'masterful' by Roxane Gay, and 'incendiary' by the New York Times.
Leah Jing McIntosh
Leah Jing McIntosh is the founding editor of Liminal magazine. As part of her work for Liminal, Leah has published books, created mentorships and fellowships, and established national literary prizes, seeking to create ...