How to Write an Autobiographical Novel - Softcover

Alexander Chee sifted through tales from his past to present golden insights into the way art can shape a life ... a singular and sincere writer of both fiction and nonfiction (TIME 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2018)

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)

Chee's insights about writing, love and activism are hard-won, honest and incredibly wise (Curtis Sittenfeld, Guardian Summer Reads)

Urgent and insightful (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Guardian Summer Reads)

Pulses with urgency ... 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)

These essays feel like a life's wisdom - its hurts, joys and redemptions - salvaged from a great fire ... This book makes me feel possible (Ocean Vuong)

Two-thirds of the way through Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, I abandoned my sharpened reviewer's pencil in favour of luxuriating in the words. Chee's writing has a mesmerizing quality; his sentences are rife with profound truths ... Chee is a very special artist; his writing is lyrical and accessible, whimsical and sad, often all at the same time (NPR)

Heartfelt, writerly essays ... powerful (Alex Preston Spectator)

As profound as they are beautiful, Chee's essays impart wisdom from a life fully lived, and speak to what it means to be a writer and reader in contemporary times (Buzzfeed)

It's so good that I could fill my word count just with quotations ... 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, and it's the gift that his wonderful new collection gives its readers (Boston Globe)