Anelise Chen is the author of So Many Olympic Exertions (Kaya Press 2017), an experimental novel that blends elements of sportswriting, memoir, and self help. She hails from Temple City, California, and received a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Fiction from NYU. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, NPR, BOMB Magazine, The New Republic, VICE, Village Voice and many other publications. She has received fellowships from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and she will be a 2019 Literature Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. She currently teaches writing at Columbia University and writes a column on mollusks for The Paris Review.

Praise for So Many Olympic Exertions:

Anelise Chen is the rare kind of writer who can bring rigorous thought into fiction without compromising the humanity of her characters, who can delve into the emotional landscape of alienation and make you feel closer to the story that’s being told, who can describe a man running and make it mean more than you would ever have imagined. With its passionate and penetrating empathy, So Many Olympic Exertions is a book that will pierce you with feeling and leave you eager to read what she creates next. — Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

Reading Anelise Chen’s debut is like being placed in a fast-moving stream it’s impossible to stop and you won’t want to. A rare joy. –– Ed Park, Author of Personal Days

Anelise Chen writes with sharp knowledge about compulsive endurance, a surprisingly familiar pathology that she slyly argues may be synonymous with our end-of-empire lifestyles. Equal parts panic attack poetry, unnerving research, and sculpted hesitation marks, So Many Olympic Exertions is a cool literature made from the hot stage fright of the children of immigrants on some live TV whizkid contest perhaps called Life Now. — Eugene Lim, author of Dear Cyborgs and The Strangers

Be yourself; fake it ‘til you make it. Never give up; quit while you’re ahead. Rise and grind; treat yo’ self. In world full of contradictory platitudes, how does one figure out what to do, how to excel, who to become? When should one push herself for once, and when learn to take it easy already? Anelise Chen’s semi-autobiographical debut novel takes on these questions with sly aplomb through a cheeky hybrid form. — Siel Ju, Los Angeles Review of Books

[A] thoughtful and inventive writer… the world [Chen] creates may remind readers of certain paintings by Gustav Klimt, wherein the characters are rendered in a doleful realist hand as their surroundings shimmer with gold leaf. — Max Ross, Electric Literature

Chen does beautiful, thoughtful returns in this book, looping around the connections between sports and life, sports and death, and the limits of those through lines. What motivates one to keep going despite death and the gruel, rote work of staying alive? Every sport, like life, appears Sisyphean from certain vantage points. The motivating action and the hard rules of a sport can seem so pointless if one isn’t a believer in the meaning attached to the game. — Yasmin Majeed, Ploughshares