Alexander Chee is the author of Edinburgh (Picador, 2002) and The Queen of the Night, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He’s the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, an NEA in Fiction, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and has written for Out, Granta.com, n+1, Paris Review Daily, and NPR. He lives in New York City and blogs at Koreanish.
After six months in Leipzig, a German reporter asks the novelist what he’ll miss. But it’s back here in the United States where more dangerous questions take shape, none easily answered with good beer.
Artist colonies are mysterious places. Available only to a select few, supposedly teeming with alcohol, affairs, and creative hoodoo. But the rumors aren’t true—if only because they lack detail. Scenes and lessons from three residencies.
Fortunetelling is easy to ridicule, frequently misunderstood, and, for some people, extremely powerful. Unfortunately, what’s very tough to predict is what reading futures will do to the person with the cards.
As America dreams of black ops teams, where do mutants belong? And can comics end wars? From Captain America to big blond Thor, Osama bin Laden, and beyond.
You are what you read. For some, that means 22 boxes of books. Facing a storage crisis of bibliolatry proportions, our writer surveys e-readers and a life spent reading.
Writers aren’t born, they’re made—from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine. And sometimes tutelage.