Two new novels explore how we make and understand ourselves (and our worlds) through their protagonists journey to research and understand another. In Activities of Daily Living, Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant living in New York, researches the performance artist Tehching Hsieh and in The Vietri Project Gabriele leaves her job in a bookstore in Berkeley to track down a customer. Their journeys take them through the 1970s New York art scene and fascist-Italy and into the complexity of care for one’s family.
Both novels have been widely praised (in the New York Times & the New Yorker among others) and we are pleased to welcome Lisa Hsiao Chen & Nicola DeRobertis-Theye as they read from their new novels and draw out connections between their work.
“[In]DeRobertis-Theye’s deft, masterly storytelling…she’s constructed a narrator who is if not exactly unreliable, then certainly withholding. Gabriele metes out information with disarming slowness, and in small doses, so that her own family history unfolds in tandem with her search for Vietri, which recalls, in its delicious twists and turns, both Oedipa Maas’s investigation of Trystero in The Crying of Lot 49 and the intensely satisfying revelations of The Goldfinch.” —The New York Times
“Chen writes with cool, elegant precision, and the book is compelling despite its diffuse structure, and its withholding of the usual pleasures of fiction, like plot and character development…Like Hsieh’s performance art, Activities of Daily Living revels in the mundane and repetitive, the simple, inexorable passage of time. It is by no means a page-turner, but it’s an utterly persuasive transmutation of the ordinary stuff of life.” —The New York Times
Lisa Hsiao Chen is the author of Activities of Daily Living (W.W. Norton) and Mouth (Kaya Press), which won a writing award from the Association of Asian American Studies. She has received a Writers’ Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, a Center for Fiction fellowship and was a resident at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Program. Born in Taipei, she now lives in New York City. more about Activities of Daily Living
Nicola DeRobertis-Theye was an Emerging Writing Fellow at the New York Center for Fiction, and her work has been published in Agni, Electric Literature, and LitHub. A graduate of UC Berkeley, she received an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, where she was the fiction editor of its literary magazine Ecotone. She is a native of Oakland, CA and lives in Brooklyn, New York. more about The Vietri Project