LATEST SALES & OFFERS: PROMOTIONS
Anelise Chen is the author of the novel So Many Olympic Exertions, a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a 5 Under 35 Honoree from the National Book Foundation. Chen is currently an assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia University. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her family.
“After Chen splits with her husband, an older man she had been with since her early 20s, her mother sends her repeated texts urging her to ‘clam down.’ In response, Chen realizes—à la Gregor Samsa—that she is a clam, and she decides her clamped-shut mollusk nature could explain everything.”—Vulture “A marvel and a delight! . . . This stunning book believes in typos as doorways, divorce as oxygen, mollusks as mercy, and seashells as generative constraints. I could hardly put it down—carrying it around like a talisman, crawling inside it like a wunderkammer, putting my ear to it like a shell, so I could hear its vast, surprising ocean. Full of heart and humor, expansive curiosity and gritty intimacy, this is a book that will stay with me forever—for its wild pulse, its compassion, its humility, and its abandon; for its gut-renovation of the first-person and its veins full of wonder. I treasure it.”—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters “A marvelously funny and affecting memoir that reads like no other . . . Brilliant and unpredictable, it reveals something essential and hidden about the nature of clams, humans, inheritance, rational thinking, obsessions, and love. This book is the companion we all need.”—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch “A modern love story embedded within a metafictional review of animal-metamorphosis tales placed within a cautionary environmental fable enclosed by an immigrant family’s saga. Anelise Chen disarmingly walks the reader through this blooming, elaborate, emotional game of shells.”—Eugene Lim, author of Search History “A candescent, transporting metamorphosis from reluctant bivalve to woman . . . There is no other writer who delves with as much comic pathos and brio into the besieged depths of the abject to surface on the shores of the ecstatic self. From the moment this mollusk opens her mouth, we are treated to the most piquant, glorious brine.”—Lisa Hsiao Chen, author of Activities of Daily Living “Ingenious, hilarious, and deeply moving, Chen’s work beguiles us, defies easy categories, and manages to be both wide-ranging and profoundly intimate.”—Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward
