How To Write An Autobiographical Novel Alexander Chee by Alexander Chee 9781328764416, 1328764419 instant download after payment.

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. 

"...every essay, no matter the subject, exhibits warmth, rigour, tact... The mask conceals and it reveals; writing transfigures and it uncovers. That’s the gift that writing has given Chee..."  -  Anthony Domestico, Boston Globe

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. 

"...for Chee, [writing] is also an act of mystic invocation and transference... Yet even at his most mystical, Chee is generous; these pieces are personal, never pedagogical. They bespeak an unguarded sincerity and curiosity... 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.'"  -  J. W. McCormack, New York Times Book Review

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.