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Memory Museum: Stories by M Lin

Featured Book

Memory Museum: Stories by M Lin

Stretching 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.

This book will be available for purchase at the event.

About This Event

We are very excited to host M Lin for an event celebrating the release of Memory Museum: Stories. For this event, M Lin will be joined in conversation by Ananda Lima. This event is co-presented with the Chicago Review of Books.

Featured Author

M Lin

M Lin is a Chinese writer and translator living in the US. Born and raised in Beijing, she writes in English as her second language. Her fiction has been published in Ploughshares, Swamp Pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023. Her nonfiction and translations can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. The Memory Museum is her first book.

In Conversation With

Ananda Lima

Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the Story Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, and named Best of the Year by Library Journal, Electric Literature, Debutiful, among others. The New York Times calls it “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.”

About the Venue

Women & Children First on top of red brick building with purple awnings.

Women & Children First

Women & Children First believes in the transformative power of literature. As intersectional trans-inclusive feminists, we believe books are tools for liberation. Since 1979, we have celebrated and amplified underrepresented voices.

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