Alexander Chee
“To write is to sell a ticket to escape, not from the truth but into it. My job is to make something happen in a space barely larger than the span of your hand, behind your eyes, distilled out of all that I have carried, from friends, teachers, people met on planes, people I have seen only in my mind, all my mother and father ever did, every favorite book, until it meets and distills from you, the reader, something out of the everything it finds in you.”
“These essays feel like a life’s wisdom, salvaged from a great fire. I feel in possession of a map of secrets and second chances, holding an inheritance whose gifts have only been partially revealed to me. But these essays are more than maps; for me, as a younger writer, they are the very ground, the earth made solid enough so that I might stand here, made rich enough so that I might plant here, and, thrive here. This book makes me feel possible.”
“Yet even at his most mystical, Chee is generous; these pieces are personal, never pedagogical. They bespeak an unguarded sincerity and curiosity. Chee is refreshingly open about his sometimes liberating, sometimes claustrophobic sense of exceptionality. As a child he reads X-Men comics and wishes for psychic powers; as an adult he finds his ambitious first efforts as a writer at odds with prevailing literary trends. Throughout, Chee endeavors to catch himself at a distance and reckon, ever humble and bracingly honest, with the slippery terrain of memory, identity and love.”
“The Queen of the Night is a luminous universe into which its lucky readers can dissolve completely, metamorphosing alongside its shapeshifting protagonist. Lilliet Berne steals her name from a gravestone and launches into a life of full-throated song; her voice is an intoxicant, and this book is a glorious performance. Chee’s enveloping, seductive prose is perfectly matched to the circus world of the opera.”
“A coming-of-age novel in the grand Romantic tradition, where passions run high, Cupid stalks Psyche, and love shares the dance floor with death . . . A lovely, nuanced, never predictable portrait of a creative soul in the throes of becoming.”
Alexander Chee is most recently the editor of Best American Essays 2022 (HarperCollins, 2022). He is the author of the widely celebrated essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel (Mariner Books, 2018), named a Best Book of 2018 by TIME, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Wired, Esquire, Buzzfeed, New York Public Library, The Boston Globe, The Paris Review, Mother Jones, and Out Magazine, among others. Two of the essays were included in Best American Essays 2016 and Best American Essays 2019. His novel The Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) was a national bestseller and a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was praised as “a brilliant performance” in The Washington Post. Chee’s debut novel, Edinburgh (Welcome Rain, 2001), was named a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year, and won the Iowa Writers' Workshop's Michener Copernicus Prize in Fiction, the Lambda Literary Foundation's Editor's Choice Prize, and the Asian American Writers' Workshop Literary Award. His reviews, essays, and stories have appeared recently in T Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New Republic, and The Sewanee Review.
He is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, an NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig House, Civitella Ranieri, and Amtrak.
In his essay “On Becoming An American Writer” in The Paris Review, Chee reflected on how to keep writing after the disastrous presidential election of 2016: “I have new lessons in not stopping, after the election. If you are reading this, and you’re a writer, and you, like me, are gripped with despair, when you think you might stop: Speak to your dead. Write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war comes—and make no mistake, it is already here—be sure you write for the living too. The ones you love and the ones who are coming for your life. What will you give them when they get there?”
Chee is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.
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