“We imagined gathering artists from different disciplines to discuss a theme. Those artists would suggest others they admired whose work related to the theme; we would then find ways to collaborate with these artists, who would in turn lead us to others.” (thx to Yuka Igarashi for the invite)

“Chen teaches us that the hard facts of living require a constant translation, and that this deciphering makes our estrangement from the supposed essence of things an ordinary feature of consciousness.”

Presented by the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture & The Fales Downtown Collection. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU:

Join writers Lisa Hsiao Chen and Eugene Lim as they think about Tehching Hsieh—as well as assemble a gift for him. For one night only, the Fales Downtown Collection will be exhibiting selections from its archives documenting Hsieh’s work, including the Rope Piece with Linda Montano.

“Alice’s project spirals beyond researching and writing about Hsieh, becoming about the very nature of ‘projects,’ interrogating the roles they play in the lives and work of artists and writers. ‘The Project’ thus becomes a frame for the baffling complexities of the life Alice is living while also opening up space for imagining what else is possible.” - Catherine Wagley

“Our editors and critics choose this year’s most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads.”

Publishers Weekly names Activities of Daily Living as one of its Best Books of 2022

“Perhaps you are the type of person for whom there is no question more chilling than: What are you working on? It suggests that you should be doing something other than just living, and that, whatever that something is, it should be hefty and unique enough for a thoughtful, possibly rehearsed, answer. For Alice, the protagonist of Lisa Hsiao Chen’s engrossing début novel, “Activities of Daily Living,” this question is not a problem.”

In-person event featuring me and Nicola DeRobertis-Theye, whose novel The Vietri Project is out in paperback.

THURS MAY 12, 2022

368 Tompkins Ave in Bed-Stuy BK

“Chen considers: What does a life consist of? How does it look, how does it feel, how does it move? And what, finally, does it become, when placed under duress, under constraint?”

“The fascination with Hsieh has become for me, as it is for Alice in Chen’s novel, a badge, a lodestar, sometimes an obsession…His work offers a challenge, a demand that hovers above us like Rilke’s famous sculpture and says: You must change your life.”

“Is such remorseless labor, Chen asks, a drain on life, the antithesis of life? Or, in its close attention to the contours of each day, its aching molecules, a deeper engagement with life?”

Shweta: “You also mention that this is a project about looking down into that hole. It’s very meta. Did writing this book ever feel like you were looking into an endless black hole?”

“Chen writes with cool, elegant precision, and the book is compelling despite its diffuse structure.”

Lisa Hsiao Chen presents Activities of Daily Living, in conversation with Eugene Lim at Greenlight Bookstore (Ft Greene location). This is an in-person event. We’ll be talking about Tehching Hsieh, durations, work, life, and other “projects.”

“Lisa Hsiao Chen and Anelise Chen in conversation about Activities of Daily Living. A deeply moving novel exploring the connections between working and living, this is a “beguiling and brilliant meditation on what it means to live and die” (Viet Thanh Nguyen).”

“Like the work of writer Rachel Cusk, who brought new thinking to what constitutes a novel, “Activities of Daily Living” takes chances with the form to strong effect.”

”Ambitiously inquisitive and ingeniously compelling, Lisa Hsiao Chen’s debut novel confronts the liminal spaces between identities, languages, expectations, realities.”

— Kirkus Review (starred review)

— Publishers Weekly (starred review)