Finalist, PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
Finalist, Gotham Book Prize
Longlist, Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Longlist, Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
New Yorker Best Books of 2022
York Times Editors’ Choice
A Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Book of 2022
Vogue | Best Books of 2022
The Millions | Most Anticipated 2022
April 2022 | W.W. Norton
ISBN: 9780393881127
"Chen writes with cool, elegant precision... [Activities of Daily Living is] an utterly persuasive transmutation of the ordinary stuff of life."
― Steph Cha, New York Times
"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... In delivering a meditation on human frailty and endurance, Chen shows us how we cling to our chosen work and the hope buried within it."
― Kathryn Ma, San Francisco Chronicle
"Highly recommend for: fans of Chen’s poetry; fans of Olivia Laing and/or Ben Lerner; anyone who’s ever found themselves consumed by art; anyone who’s fighting the very nature of time (and, really, who isn’t?)."
― Kaulie Lewis, Millions
“From the making of art to the making of families, Lisa Hsiao Chen makes us realize the great beauty and courage found in everyday acts of care, work, endurance, and survival. Weaving between one daughter and her father, one artist and his work, Activities of Daily Living becomes a beguiling and brilliant meditation on what it means to live and die.”
— Viet Thanh Nguygen, Pulitizer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed
A lucid and moving debut novel on the interconnection between work and life, loneliness and kinship, and the projects that occupy our time.
How do we take stock of a life—by what means, and by what measure? This is the question that preoccupies Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late thirties. In the off-hours from her day job, Alice struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental, yearlong 1980s performance pieces. As Alice roots deeper into Hsieh’s radical use of time and his mysterious disappearance from the art world, her project starts metabolizing events from her own life. She wanders from subway rides to street protests, loses touch with a friend, and becomes a caretaker for her stepfather, a Vietnam vet whose dream of making traditional Chinese furniture dissolved in alcoholism and dementia.
Moving between present-day and 1980s New York City, with detours to Silicon Valley and the Venice Biennale, Activities of Daily Living is a startlingly precise, vivid, and tender examination of the passage of time.
Activities of Daily Living
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Advance Praise
“Brilliant, fiercely honest, and exhilarating, Lisa Hsiao Chen’s Activities of Daily Living illuminates the symbiotic relationship of art and life—the art of life, indeed. This is riveting and memorable novel.” - Claire Messud, New York Times bestselling author of The Burning Girl
“Activities of Daily Living is an exquisitely crafted archive that documents the living grief of witnessing a parent’s slow descent while summoning to life a radical genealogy of artist and writers. This novel is proof of the transformational power of art, a sublime performance that left me enchanted!” - Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi, PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of Call Me Zebra and Savage Tongues
“Activities of Daily Living is miraculously transformative of what it holds. Organized around the artworks of Tehching Hsieh and the act of witnessing a parent’s end of life, a circumscribed but questing narrator synthesizes the chaos and fragments of time, death, and illness into a moving and brilliant arcade—a project about exceptional and quotidian endurances weaved together via lifesaving and heartbreaking bricolage.” - Eugene Lim, author of Search History and Dear Cyborgs
“The meditative quest that unfolds from this novel’s deceptively simple framework is as riveting as any page-turner . Filled with startling insight and moving detail, Activities of Daily Living will make ou want to attend to life more fully—to its joys as well as its griefs. What can literature do that other art forms can’t? This book is the answer.” - Anelise Chen, author of So Many Olympic Exertions 5 Under 35 honoree
Mouth
2009 Poetry/Prose Award Winner from the Association of Asian American Studies
Mouth, Lisa Chen’s debut collection of poetry, travels from parachute girls in Millbrae to Ezequiel the murderer at a border town, creating a cartography of geographic and bodily landscapes whose distances are measured by languages. As if wandering from place to place, Chen dabbles in different poetic forms, but always, words here confuse and betray, mouths eat and are eaten. Mouth is an elegiac love song to the mundane horrors of loss – genocide, heartbreak, revolution, exile. Yet, like Diane Arbus’ photos, Chen’s poems exude a mix of humor and pleasure, highlighting beauty in the perverse, and the perverse in the everyday. She gives voice to things that occur below the level of hearing or just beyond our notice—fragments of translated stories, unanswered bits of conversations, the mute assertiveness of a room.
ISBN: 978-1885030436