Koreanish

At an early age, people started asking me about how my parents met. As it is a good story, and I knew it, I told everyone who asked me.

Years later, as an adult, I realized most people are not asked this question.

The repeated answering of the question is one of the many things that has made me a writer, though, and so it eventually will be the subject of what I’m calling a nonfiction novel with the same name as this blog. In the meantime, here you’ll find me writing mostly about travel and literature, and occasionals on current events.

Edinburgh is my first novel, in print from Picador. My second, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. You should really read Edinburgh. Here’s some of what people have said about it:

…Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh, fucking incredible son of a bitch…

— Junot Diaz, over at Austinist

Alexander Chee is the best new novelist I’ve seen in some time. Edinburgh is moody, dramatic—and pure.

— Edmund White

Edinburgh has the force of a dream and the heft of a life. And Alexander Chee is a brilliant new writer.

— Annie Dillard

Haunting… complex… sophisticated. [Chee] says volumes with just a few incendiary words.

— The New York Times Book Review

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.

— The Washington Post Book World

Chee is a gifted, poetic writer who takes big risks…This novel marks the debut of a major talent whose career will bear watching.

— Publishers Weekly

A striking debut…A complex story told with skill and intensity, but also filled with moments when agony and extraordinary beauty somehow coexist.

— Kirkus Reviews

A complex, sophisticated, elegant investigation of trauma and desire – like a white hot flame.

— Joyce Hackett, in the Guardian UK

Some recent links you might enjoy: My correspondence with Maud Newton on the novels Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford wrote after their affair with each other; memory of campaigning for the first Returnable Bottle Bill in Maine, over at n+1. My interview of Sigrid Nunez, over at Memorious. My interview of Ursula K. LeGuin, for Guernica, The New Korean American fiction issue of Guernica I guest-edited, “Korean Enough”.

At this writing, I’ve completed a second novel, The Queen of the Night, and am editing it through into the fall. It is under contract with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and is forthcoming. I will teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the spring semester of 2011.

Thanks for stopping by. For more about my work, check out alexanderchee.net.