Author Talk! M Lin: The Memory Museum w/ Aube Rey Lescure

Book DescriptionStretching from the present to the future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin’s piercing debut collection depicts characters finding beauty amidst the disorientation of migration, the contradictions of living between cultures, the perverse realities of race and class, and the delicate dance between survival and resistance. In “Scenes from Childhood,” an elderly woman in a dystopian reality is visited by forgotten memories of her grandfather’s village. In “Magic, or Something Less Assuring,” a fraying couple goes on a divorce honeymoon in Morocco to surprising results. “You Won’t Read This in the News” imagines four migrant workers and petty thieves who forge an unshakable connection across one desperate night. A filmmaker thwarted by censorship untangles her fraught relationship to motherhood and artmaking in “Tough Egg.” And in a newly instated Memory Museum generations into the future, two sensory architects weave a moving tapestry of love and radical hope. Brimming with joy, insight, and emotional power, The Memory Museum unveils M Lin as an irresistible new talent with fearless political and stylistic imagination. About the AuthorM Lin is a Chinese writer living in the US. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Swamp Pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023, and her nonfiction can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Reviews“Each of these stories conveys an indelible emotional truth.”—Publishers Weekly“Integrating past, present, and future glimpses of China with cultural yearning and dissatisfaction, The Memory Museum is an insightful and adroit short story collection.”—Meg Nola, Foreword Reviews“M Lin can do things with the short story that no other writer can do. This collection is a masterclass is structure, character, plot, and pace. If you’re looking to learn how to write short stories, read Lin’s collection.”—Debutiful“Across the book, Lin addresses a wide range of contemporary concerns, including global warming, the aftermath of Covid, wealth disparity, censorship, and more.”—Susan Blumberg-Kason, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal“The Memory Museum is a book to get very excited about. With gumption and pizzazz M Lin can seemingly take any form, genre, or style and make it do whatever she wants, always something unexpected. But under all the technical brilliance are the timeless literary subjects: love, death, money, family, and mind-blowing sex with some random guy.”—Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection“Deeply felt and grounded in an intimate acquaintance with contemporary China, these wide-ranging stories portray villagers, protesters, artists, and petty thieves alike with empathy and grace. Nothing is easy for them, and the questions they raise are not easy for us. What an absorbing, probing debut! Wonderful.”—Gish Jen, author of Bad Bad Girl“These stories are a treasure—moving, kaleidoscopic, ingenious. The Memory Museum marks the arrival of a bold and brilliant voice.”—Madeleine Thien, author of The Book of Records“A book of astonishing vitality and vision, The Memory Museum encourages us to ask: What is and what ought to be the relationship between self and society?”—Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief“In nine stories that resist easy conclusions, M Lin builds worlds bursting with all the complexities that humans hold—longing, hunger of all sorts, and the joys that make impossible any true shunning of the grief we must feel for having loved and lived. In exacting prose, Lin illuminates how memory is the ghost we hold inside ourselves, proving it’s not the places we inhabit that are haunted, but the people, our very bodies, and how fortunate we are, whether experiencing heaven or hell, to have ever existed at all.”—Dantiel W. Moniz, author of Milk Blood Heat“M Lin’s brave and oh-so-imaginative stories unfold with cinematic clarity. In these pages is the particular flavor of loss that is the cost of migration—whether from the village to the city, or from China to the West (and back); the displacement of having multiple identities and languages; the heartbreak of time and the blade vs. comfort of nostalgia. I enjoyed living in the vibrant worlds of Lin’s prose and her wise meditations on memory, art, resistance, class, and music!”—‘Pemi Aguda, author of Ghostroots“An astounding talent with an unforgettable voice. The Memory Museum is a book for the ages.”—R. O. Kwon, author of Exhibit