Award. She is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, four critically acclaimed novels, including The Prize, and most recently, The Deceptions, and two memoirs, Poetry Will Save Your Life and a New York Times bestselling memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life.
At Lit Hub Bialosky tagged "five novels, all from different milieux, that use art— whether in a museum, a church, a city, a drawing room, or a catalog—to inspire a result in a meaningful and unexpected way." One title on the list:
Lisa Hsiao Chen, Activities of Daily LivingRead about the other entries on the list.
What if the city is the museum? In Activities of Daily Living Lisa Hsiao Chen reinvents what a novel can do. Alice, 39, a Taiwanese immigrant, lives in New York City. She is a freelance video editor, but her real passion is trawling Tehching Hsieh, a Taiwan-born performance artist, who in real life created radicalworks that he called “projects,” such as punching a time clock, every hour on the hour, and living in a cage for a year.
By following Tehching Hsieh and learning more about his work, Alice hopes to find her own project. “A new project was stirring, showing signs of life, her project about the Artist. She didn’t yet know what form it would take, only that she would work with the same raw material that he had: time.” While Alice is working on her project, she is also caretaking her stepfather who is slowly losing his abilities to perform “activities of daily living.” What happens when art and reality intersect? Is living itself a performance or a project? What constitutes a work of art? These are some of the themes Chen investigates, in this thrilling and unorthodox project of a novel. (To be transparent, I am the editor.)
Activities of Daily Living is among Coco Picard's nine novels that consider the meaning of life by confronting death.
--Marshal Zeringue
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