Alexander Chee profile picture

Alexander Chee

Sounds like my kind of tragedy

About Me


powered by frazy.com Edmund White : "Alexander Chee is the best new novelist I've seen in some time. Edinburgh is moody, dramatic---and pure." Annie Dillard: "Edinburgh has the force of a dream and the heft of a life. And Alexander Chee is a brilliant new writer." The New York Times Sunday Book Review:"Haunting... complex... sophisticated. [Chee] says volumes with just a few incendiary words." The Washington Post: "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." Publishers Weekly: "Chee is a gifted, poetic writer who takes big risks...This novel marks the debut of a major talent whose career will bear watching." Kirkus Reviews:"A striking debut...A complex story told with skill and intensity, but also filled with moments when agony and extraordinary beauty somehow coexist." Joyce Hackett, in the Guardian UK: "A complex, sophisticated, elegant investigation of trauma and desire - like a white hot flame."Alexander Chee is the author of Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), winner of the Michener/Copernicus Prize, the Asian American Writers' Workshop Literary Award, and the Lambda Editor's Choice Prize, named a Best Book of the Year by Publisher's Weekly. He's a recipient of the Whiting Writer's Award, an NEA Fellowship in Fiction, and a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. His stories and essays have appeared in the anthologies Best American Erotica 2007, Best Gay Erotica 2006, A Fictional History of the US (With Huge Chunks Missing), From Boys To Men, Loss Within Loss, Boys Like Us, and Take/Out. He lives in Massachusetts.
Check him out on the web at http://truenorth.typepad.com

My Interests

No.

I'd like to meet:

Of course it's you.

Music:

Daniel Cartier, Scissor Sisters, Of Montreal, Peaches, Raised by Swans, Snow Patrol, Justin, old house music. Ninja High School. Other stuff. I like it if I can dance to it, write to it or cook to it. I just noticed the other day, though, that my top-rated iPod list and my most-played list...are a little different from each other. Which means I may not even be able to tell myself what music I like.

Movies:

Angel At My Table, 5X2, Junebug, Me, You and Everyone We Know, Bladerunner, Heathers, Charade, Taxi Zum Klo, Friends With Money, Akira, Howl's Moving Castle, Jesus Is Magic, In The Mood For Love, Lost In Translation, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. And Pussycat, Kill, Kill.

Television:

Entourage, Footballer's Wives, Lost, Ugly Betty, Survivor, and Battlestar Galactica, the old one and the new one. When I fly Jetblue, I can't stop watching Cash in the Attic on the BBC America, and I work on my crush on Alistair Appleton.

Books:

A few: Joan of Arc, by Vita Sackville-West, The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson, Black Tickets, by Jayne Anne Phillips, Close to the Knives, by David Wojnarowicz, Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin, Autobiography of Red, by Anne Carson, The Carnivore's Inquiry, by Sabina Murray, Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami, the entire bodies of work of Joan Didion, Deborah Eisenberg, Marilynne Robinson, Mary Robison, Annie Dillard, Marina Tsvetaeva, the poems of Denis Johnson, My Alexandria by Mark Doty, Cape of Storms and the Tattered Cloak, by Nina Berberova, Paul Lisicky's Famous Builder, Chris Adrian's The Children's Hospital, the stories of Miranda July and Yiyun Li, the stories of Richard Bausch, all of the manga by Kazuo Koike (Lone Wolf and Cub, Crying Freeman, Strain, Path of the Assassin, Lady Snowblood and others), and Scott Pilgrim, Volumes I-III, by Brian Lee O'Malley. Among some others.

Heroes:

Joan Didion, Joy Williams, Larry Kramer, David Wojnarowicz, Alan Hollinghurst, Theresa Hak Yung Cha.