 | |
| Author | Lisa Hsiao Chen |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
Publication date | April 12, 2022 |
| ISBN | 9780393881127 |
Activities of Daily Living is the first novel by Lisa Hsiao Chen, [1] published by Norton in 2022. It was widely praised and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and nominated for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
Alice, an immigrant from Taiwan who lives in New York and works freelance as a video editor, and her older sister Amy, a single mother who lives in San Jose, share responsibility for the care of their stepfather, an alcoholic white American who loved making traditional Chinese furniture and now has dementia. The novel interweaves Alice's musings about his decline as she visits him in a succession of assisted living facilities in the San Francisco Bay Area with her increasing obsession with the life and career of Tehching Hsieh, a retired Taiwanese artist in New York known for year-long performance art projects. Alice herself habitually works on artistic projects, and is formulating her approach to one about the Artist, a response to Hsieh. [2] [3] She conceives of looking after her father as also a project, and after he dies, imagines that if she had shared that with him, he would have told her, "Take your time". [1]
Activities of Daily Living was generally well received by critics, including starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews [4] and Publishers Weekly . [5] Publishers Weekly included it in their list of the top ten books of 2022, regardless of genre, [6] and Vogue also noted it as one of the best books of the year. [7]
Reviewers commented on the loose narrative structure. The reviewer for Publishers Weekly said that it contributed to a "deeply empathic portrayal" with "careful and illuminating observations on issues of cultural difference, productivity, family, and freedom". [5] Writing in The New Yorker , Hua Hsu described the novel as "digressive without feeling showy, sombre yet never maudlin". [1] Steph Cha wrote in The New York Times that Chen "set out to write an unconventional, rambling novel of ideas and make it hang together with minimal narrative tension"; she described the novel as "an utterly persuasive transmutation of the ordinary stuff of life". [3] The San Francisco Chronicle reviewer wrote that "[t]he whole novel reads like a project coming into existence" and called it "a meditation on human frailty and endurance [that shows] how we cling to our chosen work and the hope buried within it". [2] The reviewer for Booklist referred to the novel as "[a]mbitiously inquisitive and ingeniously compelling" and wrote that it "confronts the liminal spaces between identities, languages, expectations, realities". [8]
Activities of Daily Living was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, [9] and for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction in 2023. [10]
Carol Ann Shields, was an American-born Canadian novelist and short story writer. She is best known for her 1993 novel The Stone Diaries, which won the U.S. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Governor General's Award in Canada.
Catherine Chidgey is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer and university lecturer. She has published eight novels. Her honours include the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters; the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France; Best First Book at both the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize ; the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards on two occasions; and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize.
Publishers Weekly (PW) is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers, and literary agents. Published continuously since 1872, it has carried the tagline, "The International News Magazine of Book Publishing and Bookselling". With 51 issues a year, the emphasis today is on book reviews.
The Lazarus Project is a 2008 novel by Bosnian fiction writer and journalist Aleksandar Hemon. It features the true story of the death of Lazarus Averbuch, a teenaged Jewish immigrant to Chicago who was shot and killed by a police officer in 1908. It was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the winner of the inaugural Jan Michalski Prize for Literature in 2010.
Joan Thomas is a Canadian novelist and book reviewer from Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Tatjana Soli is an American novelist and short-story writer. Her first novel, The Lotus Eaters (2010), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (UK), was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize, was a New York Times Bestseller, and a New York Times 2010 Notable Book. It has been optioned for a movie. Her second novel, The Forgetting Tree (2012) was a New York Times Notable Book. Soli's third novel, The Last Good Paradise, was among The Millions "Most Anticipated" Books of 2015. Her fourth novel, The Removes (2018), was named a New York Times Editor's Choice and longlisted for the Chautauqua Prize. Soli was longlisted for the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize honoring a mid-career writer. Her non-fiction has appeared in a variety of publications including The New York Times Book Review.
Carol Louise Edgarian is an American writer, editor, and publisher. Her novels include Rise the Euphrates, Three Stages of Amazement, and Vera. She is the co-founder and editor of the non-profit Narrative Magazine, a digital publisher of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and art; and founder of Narrative for Schools, whose programs provide free learning and teaching resources for students and educators.
Suzette Mayr is a Canadian novelist who has written five critically acclaimed novels. Currently a professor at the University of Calgary's Faculty of Arts, Mayr's works have both won and been nominated for several literary awards.
Ashley Little is a Canadian author of both adult and young adult literature.
Emma Hooper is a Canadian writer. She is most notable for her 2018 novel Our Homesick Songs, which was named as a longlisted nominee for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Born and raised in Alberta, she moved to England in 2004 after completing her B.A. in music and writing at the University of Alberta. She completed an M.A. in creative writing at Bath Spa University before undertaking a Ph.D. in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia, which she completed in 2010. She subsequently taught at Bath Spa University. Her debut novel, Etta and Otto and Russell and James, was published in 2015, and was a shortlisted finalist for the amazon.ca First Novel Award. Our Homesick Songs followed in 2018.
Interior Chinatown is a 2020 novel by Charles Yu. It is his second novel and was published by Pantheon Books on January 28, 2020. It won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The novel was also longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was shortlisted for the Prix Médicis étranger.
Lisa Hsiao Chen is a Taiwanese-born American writer, based in Brooklyn, most famous for the widely reviewed autofiction Activities of Daily Living.
How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a 2020 debut novel by American author C Pam Zhang. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature for Adult Fiction. The book was published by Riverhead Books in North America and by Virago Press in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth.
Jason Mott is an American novelist and poet. His fourth novel, Hell of a Book, won the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction.
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is a 2021 historical fiction novel by Dawnie Walton published by 37 Ink. It received the 2022 Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award, the 2022 Aspen Words Literary Prize, and was nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction.
The Rabbit Hutch is a 2022 debut novel by writer Tess Gunty and winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction. Gunty won the inaugural Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize for the novel.
The Sleeping Car Porter is a novel by Canadian writer Suzette Mayr, published in August 2022 by Coach House Books. Set in the 1920s, the novel centres on Baxter, a Black Canadian and closeted gay immigrant from the Caribbean who is working as a railway porter to save money to fund his dream of getting educated as a dentist.
If I Survive You is the debut book by Jonathan Escoffery, published on September 6, 2022. It is a collection of eight interlinked short stories that follow the struggles of an immigrant family from Jamaica who build a new home in Miami. The story's main character is Trelawny, an American-born son of immigrants who grapples with identity, familial and cultural issues through various phases of adolescence and adulthood.
Jonathan Escoffery is an American writer. His debut novel, If I Survive You, was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Fiction and shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, among other honors. The novel was well received by critics with reviews applauding Escoffery's humor, narrative style and exploration of identity in the immigrant experience.
Lexi Freiman is an Australian writer.