Anelise Chen NEWS
On November 3, 2017, the Friday of homecoming weekend at USC, Kaya Press hosted its annual Visions and Voices event with Kaya authors Anelise Chen and Q.M. Zhang in conversation with Los Angeles–based writers Tisa Bryant and Chris Kraus around the topic of hybrid fiction. To usher in the discussion, each writer first read from […]
I Love Dick, Chris Kraus’s auto-fiction about the obsessions of a writer named Chris Kraus, has influenced a generation of writers to experiment with blurring fact and fiction as a way to claim radical subjectivity. The book has now been adapted into an Amazon Prime series produced by Jill Soloway (Transparent). In a conversation about how […]
So Many Olympic Exertions
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Blending elements of self-help, memoir, and sports writing, So Many Olympic Exertions is an experimental novel that perhaps most resembles what the ancient Greeks called hypomnemata, or “notes to the self” in the form of observations, reminders, and self-exhortations. Taken together, these notes constitute a personal handbook on “how to live” or perhaps more urgently “why to live,” a question the narrator, graduate student Athena Chen, desperately needs answering.
When Chen hears news that her brilliant friend from college has committed suicide, she is thrown into a fugue of fear and doubt. Through a fascinating collection of anecdotes and close readings of moments in the sometimes harrowing (ie., bloody) world of sports, the novel questions the validity and usefulness of our current narratives of success by focusing attention on seemingly mundane, unexpected, or “failed” moments.
A deep examination of life’s epic and daily moments, So Many Olympic Exertions puts a spin on the auto-fiction trend in the vein of Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner to examine what counts as meaningful in the field of our lives. Is it “winning” goals, dominating others, acting upon unbridled ambition, or the relentless stockpiling of fame and validation? Or can meaning be generated in others ways, through moments of mutuality and shared practice? In her debut novel, Anelise Chen brings you a completely original take on the sports novel.
Anelise Chen NEWS
On November 3, 2017, the Friday of homecoming weekend at USC, Kaya Press hosted its annual Visions and Voices event with Kaya authors Anelise Chen and Q.M. Zhang in conversation with Los Angeles–based writers Tisa Bryant and Chris Kraus around the topic of hybrid fiction. To usher in the discussion, each writer first read from […]
I Love Dick, Chris Kraus’s auto-fiction about the obsessions of a writer named Chris Kraus, has influenced a generation of writers to experiment with blurring fact and fiction as a way to claim radical subjectivity. The book has now been adapted into an Amazon Prime series produced by Jill Soloway (Transparent). In a conversation about how […]
