Named a Best Book of 2018 by New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Publisher's Weekly, NPR, and Time, among many others, this essay collection from the author of The Queen of the Night explores how we form identities in life and in art. As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as 'masterful' by Roxane Gay, 'incendiary' by the New York Times, and 'brilliant' by the Washington Post. With his first collection of nonfiction, he's sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author's manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how lessons on the writing life learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and in this powerful work of queer literature, reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of