The Reading Warehouse

An essay collection exploring his education as a man, writer, and activist-and how we form our identities in life and in art.

As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as masterful by Roxane Gay, incendiary by the New York Times, and brilliant by the Washington Post. With How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, his first collection of nonfiction, he is sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well.

How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author's manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation's history, including his father's death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing-Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley-the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump.

By turns commanding, heartbreaking, and wry, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel asks questions about how we create ourselves in life and in art and how to fight when our dearest truths are under attack.

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic, an editor-at-large at the Virginia Quarterly Review, and a critic-at-large at the Los Angeles Times. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2016, the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Guernica, and Tin House, among others. He is an associate professor of English at Dartmouth College.

Daniel K. Isaac was born on December 5, 1988 in Fullerton, California. He is an actor and writer, known for Billions, Money Monster, and Too Big to Fail.