Award-winning writer, editor, and teacher Alexander Chee has partnered with subscription box service Boxwalla for an exciting new project: a six-box American fiction series titled “On Becoming an American Writer.” Boxes will ship every other month beginning in September 2022, with each box featuring two books and a bookish gift curated by Chee.
The Nerd Daily had the great pleasure of asking Chee a few questions about this American fiction series. Read on to learn how he hopes the books will shape readers’ ideas about American fiction, which books will be featured in the first box, and why he’s just like any other bibliophile when it comes to traveling.
Also, be sure to check out more details about the boxes and subscribe here!
Hello Alexander, and thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions for The Nerd Daily! Boxwalla is launching a new six-box American fiction series curated by you. How did this collaboration come about?
AC: At some point in 2019 Lavanya and Sandeep reached out to ask me if I might like to receive their book box subscription. I said yes and they’ve very generously sent those boxes ever since, never once requiring that I post about them or letting me pay. I would post, from time to time, out of my genuine enthusiasm for the books, which ranged widely and included many works in translation, and treats like halvah or literary postcards, other small gifts. It was like getting a box from a thoughtful friend every month. When they invited me to do this last year—it was their idea—I came back with this proposal.
The subscription box series is titled “On Becoming an American Writer,” named after the final chapter of your book How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Could you share a bit about how that essay influenced your book selections? Did you have a particular process or framework for selecting books for this series?
That essay was inspired by James Alan McPherson’s essay of the same title. His essay is a favorite of mine, and I returned to it again and again over the years for comfort. I had this massive disorderly draft of an essay composed over years and when I thought about his title as a prompt, it came together and made sense. I was thinking of when Joan Didion took Robert Graves’ memoir title, Goodbye To All That, for her essay on leaving New York.
I had met him as a student at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and he was my thesis advisor as well as a teacher to a seminar that changed my direction as an artist. He was the only Black faculty member at the time, and for a long time, for that matter. He mentored many of us over the years, so many that his friends would be concerned he wasn’t doing his work. And then I heard a story after his death about how he saw that mentoring as a part of his work—the many letters of recommendation he wrote for us all, for example, a very invisible part of the work, to the public, was one way he saw himself as changing the culture. So I set about choosing writers that reflect a wider vision of American fiction than what we usually see. One I hope he’d find exciting , if he could see it.
How would you like the selections in this series to inform or shape readers’ ideas about American fiction? What do you hope readers will gain from these books?
Lavanya and Sandeep were not so interested in American fiction at first and more or less said so to me in our first conversations—and that amused me, as they have astonishingly good taste in books. And it should be said American fiction has been seen as provincial and full of a narcissistic belief in its own importance for a long time, maybe as long as our writers have written books but at least for the last century. I wasn’t surprised—I first encountered that skepticism decades ago and found the truth of it—as a college student, the American writers I could find were often boring or embarrassing to me. So much was kept from Americans as a condition of enjoying the prosperity here, and that became the way those offering that prosperity took it away—a systemic pickpocketing of people as they dream the American dream. So I saw this as a series for readers like Sandeep and Lavanya. America isn’t as provincial as our literature but that’s changing, and that’s what I wanted to showcase.
The first subscription box will kick things off with The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela and Brother Alive by Zain Khalid. Could you speak a bit about these novels and what drew you to them?
They are two novels that really excited me. Both reinvent the generic American suburb, one of the main sites for the fiction of this country, and especially the many novels set in the areas around New York City. With two novels set respectively in Long Island and Staten Island, the box is an invitation to begin to revisit these places. Both are about families who fled their home countries because the American empire remade those countries into places of tremendous strife, overt and covert, by supporting corrupt regimes in order to enable the American arms trade—El Salvador, Columbia, Saudi Arabia—and tell very different stories born from the same root. Read together you get a larger vision of our country’s place in the world, and our place within this country.
I understood my life very differently after reading both novels, effectively re-educated in relationship to what I already thought I knew. Which brings me to my next point—the series isn’t just about the books individually, each box is an invitation to read them alongside each other.
If you were going to send subscriptions to a few people, whether you know them personally or not, who would you want to share this series with and why?
I think there’s a temptation to send them to people like the British radio presenter who asked me why UK readers might be interested in essays by a gay Korean American man. But I don’t want to waste my time like that. It’s really for the interested reader, what I hope they’ll experience as a present to them.
You also have the distinction of being the editor for this year’s edition of The Best American Essays, out November 1st – and the first Asian American editor in the series’ history. Which was more difficult: selecting essays for this collection or selecting books for the Boxwalla series?
The essays were harder to choose, and I could have chosen twice as many as they let me. That part is also true for this series—I could easily do another six boxes—but it was fun to select these books, and to think about the conversations the books create with each other, and those choices came pretty easily.
Let’s Get Nerdy: Behind the Writer with 9 Quick Questions
- First book that made you fall in love with reading: The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien cast quite a spell when I was young. Reread it and the subsequent trilogy every summer for six years.
- 3 books you would take on a desert island: I always bring more books than that when I travel. If it’s the result of an accident I’d treat them like a tarot reading. If on purpose, I’m sure I would find a way to cheat. But the books I’d let them find in my luggage would be The Children’s Hospital, by Chris Adrian; All Aunt Hagar’s Children, by Edward P. Jones; and China Men, by Maxine Hong Kingston.
- Movie that you know by heart: The Handmaiden (Adjussi) by Park Chan-Wook.
- Place that everyone should see in their lifetime: In the era of the refugee, the place that makes them feel like they are home.
- Introvert or extrovert: Extrovert.
- Coffee, tea, or neither: Both. Coffee consoles in the morning and tea at night.
- First job: Central Wharf parking attendant, in Portland, ME.
- Person you admire most and why: Angeli Gomez, the mother who ran into the Uvalde elementary school for her children when the police would not save them. And after she got them out, she told the truth about it.
