Lisa Hsiao Chen Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Lisa Hsiao Chen is a successful published author.

She was born in Taipei and has been the recipient of a 2018 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. She was before that an emerging fiction fellow at the Center for Fiction, as well as a resident at the Workspace Program funded by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council.

Lisa is also a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She also has a poetry collection that is titled Mouth that was released by Kaya Press in 2007. Her debut novel is titled Activities for Daily Living. It was critically received well. It is a finalist for the 2023 PEN/Hemingway Award for debut novel as well as a finalist for the 2023 Gotham Book Prize.

The novel was also longlisted for the 2023 Carol Shields Prize as well as the 2022 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. The book was selected as a Vogue Best Book of the Year and was an Editor’s Choice selection from the New York Times Book Review. The novel has been called ‘beguiling and brilliant’ by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

Activities for Daily Living is the debut novel by Lisa Hsiao Chen. It is an examination on the connection that exists between care, art, work, as well as the passing of time.

How does one take stock of what a life is, by what means and through what measure? This is the very thing that is perplexing Alice and taking up space in her mind. Alice is a Taiwanese immigrant who is in her late thirties.

Alice has a day job but when she has some time off, she struggles to come up with a project that is about the downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his 1980s performance pieces that are not just monumental but going all year long.

Then she also becomes the caretaker for her stepfather who is getting older. He’s a veteran from Vietnam who has a dream about making traditional Chinese furniture that is combated by the problem of not only his dementia but his alcoholism.

As Alice gets into a little more depth about how the artist radically uses time, she starts to understand more about him. One piece saw Hsieh confining himself to a cell for the course of a year, which was incredible and impressive. In another art piece, he would punch a time clock on the hour every hour for an entire year.

He also mysteriously disappeared from the art world, and the project that Alice takes on she notices also starts to take in events that are occurring from her own life. Alice meanwhile takes the subway, goes to street protests, gets out of touch with a friend, and with some tenderness takes in the slow decline of her father as she is caring for him.

Alternating between the present and the New York City of the 80’s, while also taking its own detours to the Venice Biennale and the Silicon Valley, this debut not only brings the author to a modern audience but shows off her talent as well.

If you have been interested by this summary of the novel then you likely will want to find out more about this intimate look at the passage of time and the creative life by picking up a copy of Activities for Daily Living by Lisa Hsiao Chen and having the chance to absorb every word of this fascinating debut novel.