Hello dear reader,
It’s been a while. A lot has happened. I’m writing to you from London, first of all, where I’ll be for four months as a part of my role as director of Dartmouth’s London Foreign Studies Program for our English and Creative Writing Department. I’m living in Bloomsbury and will be co-teaching a class at Queen Mary University of London with the remarkable Katherine Angel.
But yes, tonight I’m writing to you about American fiction. Specifically, a series I ran with Boxwalla on my sense of American fiction now. Every other month for the last year, subscribers received two books and a letter from me, along with a writerly something extra. Boxwalla’s subscription boxes before this covered primarily global fiction in translation. Could I imagine an American fiction series that would fit in with their boxes? They had successfully predicted Annie Ernaux’s Nobel prize win, I’d add, earlier that year.
The experiment with them had begun even before they asked me to do this, however, when a magazine reached out to me to ask me what I thought was happening with American fiction. Could I send along a few paragraphs? It seemed like not enough room. I was looking at several piles of books in my home, sent to me by publishers, agents, and writers, asking me for blurbs.
Another challenge I gave myself: I wanted to avoid what I call “the conversation about the same five books.” The way the literary conversation can collect around the same titles, online, to the detriment of a larger cohort.
I began with two favorites up front—Alejandro Varela’s Town of Babylon and Zain Khalid’s Brother Alive, two novels I saw as redefining the idea of writing about American life. I followed up with two more: Jean Ho’s Fiona and Jane and Jeffery Escoffrey’s If I Survive You, interconnected short story collections that reached deeply into the possibilities of that form to write about friendship and family. Ryan Lee Wong’s Whose Side Are You On and Akil Kumarasamy’s Meet Us By The Roaring Sea, novels about the mothers as a way to understand the past and the present, the future also. Then came The Hero Of This Story, by Elizabeth McCracken and Search History by Eugene Lim, each a different approach to autofiction and metafiction respectively. After that was La Tercera, by Gina Apostol, and Your Love Is Not Good, by Johanna Hedva. The theme here was feminist and femme swagger.
And now we reach the end. In this last sixth box is Night Wherever We Go, by Tracey Rose Peyton, and Uranians, by Theodore McCombs. You can sign up here to receive the last box. The Peyton is about a group of enslaved Black women on a plantation in Texas determined to resist their owner’s attempt to impregnate them. It is a remarkable story of how these women remake their community bonds with each other as a way to make their future. Uranians collects stories and a novella that imagine queer futures out past the limits of the present. If you imagine the difference, say, between Stonewall and now in our lives, and project that into the future onto a spaceship headed for another part of the galaxy, you have a sense of where this collection is going.
As I look back on the group, I can see what remains then is to take in a sense of the whole. Of fiction written about the lives we live here, and the histories of this place, and the possibilities of it also. I was looking in each box for the reader to receive not just a sort of material experience of the book—though that matters—but also for them to feel as if I’d sent them a conversation. If you’ve been reading along, and you have a vision of what you’ve seen across these books that you’d like to share with me, please write back to me here or leave a comment here, and I’ll hope to include it in the next newsletter.
Each of the boxes has come with a small token: a notebook, an Ex Libris stamp, a hand fan. This last one has two issues of the literary magazine One Story, a magazine I love in part because each issue is a chap book containing one story, just as the title infers. I love chap books for the way they can stay in the pockets of my jackets and totes, forgotten until I find them again, renewed, for the next trip I take with them. I hope if you haven’t yet encountered the magazine that this will be a good introduction and that you’ll consider subscribing.
Yours from just outside the Dickens Museum,
Alexander Chee
PS: I’ll be writing a whole new season of the newsletter more regularly from London. I hope you’ll follow along.
I’m speaking at Daunt Books on Oct. 6th. Am in conversation with a few people about other opportunities. Would be happy to chat with you about it.
Hi Alexander, will you be hosting any speaking events in London? Would you be interested in coming to Brunel University?