Alexander Chee was born in Rhode Island, and raised in South Korea, Guam and Maine. He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony , the VCCA, Ledig House, the Hermitage and Civitella Ranieri . His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editors Choice Prize, and was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection. In 2003, Out Magazine honored him as one of their 100 Most Influential People of the Year. His essays and stories have appeared in Granta.com, Out,The Man I Might Become, Loss Within Loss, Men On Men 2000, His 3 and Boys Like Us. He has taught fiction and nonfiction writing at the New School University, Wesleyan, Amherst College, and in spring 2011 will teach in the Fiction program at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in New York City and blogs at Koreanish.
The Silver Book (2025) Olivia Laing "This is a novel to fall in love with-at least I did-a canny hustler of a novel, brilliant, obsessive, hot, and yet it is also like the light on the water at night in Venice. This is the kind of novel you steal from your spouse or vice versa. And it is the work of an artist at the height of their powers-as if I could admire Laing more."
Oxford Soju Club (2025) Jinwoo Park "Jinwoo Park's Oxford Soju Club takes you over like music, immediate and eventually obsessive, the sort of book you cheat on your work with, the one you slip away to read. Sentence for sentence the prose is a fine thread winding through this game of spies, and eventually you realize the thread also winds through you. And this is because Park is not just a master but an enchanter."
The Slip (2025) Lucas Schaefer "A fascinating novel full of so much life. Lucas Schaefer takes a lapidary eye to these characters and Austin, holding them up to the light and tracing stories only he could tell. I can't think of another writer like this except maybe Marquez, though I think The Slip is bawdier than his work - and thus, a novel he might have loved."
When the Harvest Comes (2025) Denne Michele Norris "A story of becoming yourself that isn't like anything I've ever read. We are still getting the literature we deserve, and Norris takes us further down that road with this brave and powerful novel exploring the freedom we find in the presence of those loves we cannot hide from."
Loca (2025) Alejandro Heredia "Loca asks, how do we find each other and love each other, see each other, save each other, and this novel answers, again and again, like this."
The Sisters K (2024) Maureen Sun "There's a brutal misogynist logic that underpins Korean patriarchal culture and yet it is so rarely dramatized this intimately in Korean American fiction; here it organizes every part of these sisters' lives, as it does for so many. Chilling, tender, fierce and sharp, the resulting novel is an inheritance drama where everyone is running from their family, one of the most original novels about sisters and family I've read in some time."
Old Crimes (2024) Jill McCorkle "Jill McCorkle has had an extraordinary ear for the music of ordinary life since the beginning of her career, able to work with the voices we know so well to write these stories about they will not tell us, what they would rather not tell us, what they hope to tell us, what too often goes unsaid. And this collection is a new wonder."
Above the Salt (2023) Katherine Vaz "The first time I ever heard Katherine Vaz read, I remember thinking, Who is this sorceress? as she made me cry in public. Now we have a new novel from her, and the magic has expanded."
Blackouts (2023) Justin Torres "Blackouts gives me what I read fiction for, what I read for at all-the sense of a brilliant mind creating a puzzle in the air in front of me, all intelligence and surprises. Ambitious, disarming, full of a kind of daring that winks as it passes-as if David Wojnarowicz rewrote Nabokov's Pale Fire and then left it for years in an abandoned building, just for you."
The Apology (2023) Jimin Han "The Apology is an uncanny high wire act - arch, tender, mercurial. Jimin Han feels like Iris Murdoch's heir here, even as this novel came from an artistry that is all her own. This is a story unlike any other of Korea and America, and of a mother's love - majestic, a deathless avenger, shrewd and wild; an ajumma willing to do anything for her family, including defying death."
The Late Americans (2023) Brandon Taylor "The Late Americans is a dizzying plunge into the lives of young people making art in America in the era of survival capitalism, grappling over the big questions like they're fighting over a gun. Deep within their ambitions, their pettiness and lust, is the meaning and even grandeur they seek - and whether or not his characters ever find it, Brandon Taylor has. A bravura performance on the edge of a knife."
The People Who Report More Stress (2023) Alejandro Varela "Alejandro Varela is one of my favorite short story writers . . . An iconoclast of tenderness, a compass in the storm this life always is."
Monstrilio (2023) Gerardo Sámano Córdova "An extraordinary act of imagination, an extended meditation that begins in grief, family, belonging, and moves past that, into a deeper discovery of the power of love - and the powerlessness of love, as well its strangeness. With Monstrilio, Samano Cordova makes a remarkable, kaleidoscopic debut."
Skull Water (2023) Heinz Insu Fenkl "The novel in your hands is something I never knew I'd see, born from things at least two governments hoped to hide. A mixed German Korean boy in 1970s Korea undertakes a quest to save the living with what the dead might know, and he tells us stories across time of this almost- vanished world, and the lives of those thrown away by Korean society and American military forces - his family. Precious, life altering, rebellious, funny, and full of a necessary truth."
Which Side Are You On (2022) Ryan Lee Wong "Salty, funny, angry, and heartbreaking, Which Side Are You On synthesizes the struggles of a family that has been working and hoping for a better world for two, maybe three, generations, and in the process, renews our sense of the histories involved--American history, Korean American history, Black history, Los Angeles history. This is a stunning debut, but also a novel I didn't know I was waiting for."
Nuclear Family (2022) Joseph Han "One of the most original novels I've read in the last decade. Nuclear Family imagines a story of the lives of our Korean ancestors in the present tense, their ghost life as full of urgency, politics, and complication as our own. How far does the separation at the thirty-eighth parallel go?, Han asks. All the way into the land of spirit, a wound for the living and the dead."
The Kingdom of Sand (2022) Andrew Holleran "So many of us are wondering, how do we live after losing everything and everyone we loved? Some of us have lived through that, from the most recent pandemic before this one. Andrew Holleran's report from the other side is a novel with, if not answers to guide us, questions to guide us. An unexpectedly timely novel-wise, shrewd, and in its way, kind, if honesty is ever kind. And written with the sure hand of a master."
The Partition (2022) Don Lee "Whatever you're hiding from may find you in a Don Lee story. But this isn't a warning. The Partition is, again and again, about Asian Americans in ways we don't always admit we need, a collection about how we alternately cheat and show up for each other and ourselves. And the whole time, there's a canny, shrewd love, guiding us the way through."
Little Foxes Took Up Matches (2022) Katya Kazbek "Many have tried and failed to summon the magic Katya Kazbek wields here as matter of factly as a switchblade. A relief, really, to read a debut novel as original as this--as cunning, wild and free."
Disorientation (2022) Elaine Hsieh Chou "Disorientation is a multivalent pleasure, a deeply original debut novel that reinvents the campus novel satire as an Asian American literary studies whodunnit, in which the murder victim might be your idea of yourself - no matter how you identify. I often held my breath until I laughed and I wouldn't dare compare it or Chou to anyone writing now. Wickedly funny and knowing, Chou's dagger wit is sure-eyed, intent on what feels like a decolonization of her protagonist, if not the reader, that just might set her free."
Fiona and Jane (2022) Jean Chen Ho "Fiona and Jane is a high wire act of a collection, the stories born of the experiments in daring you feel around the friend you are sure will always be there. Amid the intricate fretwork of adhoc desires, missing family, and rehearsals for adulthood, a cool-handed nerve shapes it all--Jean Chen Ho's brilliant debut is as assured as what must surely follow."
Love in the Big City (2021) Sang Young Park "Sang Young Park is my new favorite writer, as in his work we see life in modern Korea in what I think of as a fuller way, due to the inclusion of queer lives there. This novel is bawdy, hilarious, heartbreaking, fearless."
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost (2021) David Hoon Kim "Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost wasn’t like anything I’d read before: an adventure among languages, but also Paris, about the ways languages control us-the ones we grew up with, the ones we learn as adults, the ones we never learn but might have-and how they set boundaries we almost never see, on our lives, our desires, our sense of possibility, even our ghosts, except in glimpses. I left haunted in ways I hadn’t thought possible."
The Human Zoo (2021) Sabina Murray "Domestic drama or international crisis, or both? For families, like Christina Klein's, it is always both. The Human Zoo begins with Klein's frank, gimlet-eyed assessments of her family and friends, in a Philippines controlled by a Duterte-like president, but what emerges effortlessly out of this is a spectacle of her family of aristocrats brought low by the populists they believe they control, and a vision of the Philippines but also of America, the two countries now more alike than ever before. One of the most interesting novels I've read in years, Murray is at the height of her powers, offering us a breathtaking, funny, terrifying oracle."
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek (2019) (Book Woman of Troublesome Creek, book 1) Kim Michele Richardson "A rare literary adventure that casts librarians as heroes, smart tough women on horseback in rough terrain doing the brave and hard work of getting the right book into the right hands. Richardson has weaved an inspiring tale about the power of literature."
Miracle Creek (2019) Angie Kim "I know this story but have never seen it in a novel?the struggles of the Korean immigrant entrepreneur in America, with a technology that seems like magic, who can go from hero to villain in an instant, now at the center of what is possibly a murder?a bright seam of crisis, mystery, and love emerges in these pages. Kim has written a bold debut novel about science and immigration and the hopes and fears each engenders?unforgettable and true."
Leading Men (2019) Christopher Castellani "Leading Men is a daredevil of a novel, like the prettiest boy in the gay bar doing a backflip off a stool and not spilling his drink. Castellani has set his eye on that ineffable profane that is the other face of the divine, in a novel that unites my obsessions with Tennessee Williams, Luchino Visconti, Truman Capote, film, cruising, and Italy, and wraps it up in a love story, but a story of old love--love of a kind we almost never see written."
Bangkok Wakes to Rain (2019) Pitchaya Sudbanthad "A bold and tender novel about the unforgivable and the unforgiven, and how to live past what you thought you could not survive. Sudbanthad arrives to us already a masterful innovator of the form."
Those Who Knew (2018) Idra Novey "Those Who Knew is a beautiful novel about that which we cannot deny, in ourselves or others, and the price we are too often willing to pay for what we think is like freedom."
The Air You Breathe (2018) Frances de Pontes Peebles "The Air You Breathe is that kind of fairy tale where the curse is that your dreams come true, and keep coming true, and you have to survive it for the rest of your life. Two girls run after their dreams of samba, stardom, friendship, and art, and the result is this glittering, mesmerizing triumph of a novel."
Confessions of the Fox (2018) Jordy Rosenberg "A triumphant debut . . . Adventure and erudition meet with a loose-limbed poetry in every sentence, and the result is a magician's trick of a novel but on a grand scale."
The Ensemble (2018) Aja Gabel "Sweeping, romantic, elegiac, The Ensemble gives you the feeling of being inside the music of a quartet, a look into the relationships under the music, the love and heartbreak, set against their ruthless commitment to both their art, and to each other. Aja Gabel is a phenomenon."
Whiskey & Ribbons (2018) Leesa Cross-Smith "Cross-Smith's thrilling debut novel, Whiskey and Ribbons, is as immediate and compelling as music. Her three lovers tell their stories, each turning over what we think we know, creating a moving triptych on love, desire, and grief, and the unexpected families life makes for us."
The Merry Spinster (2018) Daniel M Lavery and Mallory Ortberg "The secret to THE MERRY SPINSTER, I think, is that she never wanted to be your wicked stepmother--she was too busy. There are uncanny slivers of delight and recognition mixed here with the wit we all love Ortberg for, but here that wit is wielded with new force. If fairy tales are ways to describe the rules we don't dare put down on paper, in her hands they become ways to challenge those, or even to write new rules. I don't know if these stories are for bedtimes, but they are for us."
Lost in Arcadia (2017) Sean Gandert "This novel is like if Sword Art Online and Stranger Things had a child, just so it could tell you a story about the future. This brilliant novel is about how what we love about games can become what we fear about the world, without our noticing, until it is done. Prescient, funny, smart, a story to disappear into and come out the other side."
All Grown Up (2017) Jami Attenberg "Jami Attenberg's All Grown Up is one part Denis Johnson, one part Grace Paley, but all her. Every sentence pulls taut and glows--electric, gossipy, searing fun that is also a map to how to be more human."
Everything I Never Told You (2014) Celeste Ng "If we know this story, we haven't seen it yet in American fiction, not until now... Ng has set two tasks in this novel's doubled heart - to be exciting, and to tell a story bigger than whatever is behind the crime."
