Activities of Daily Living

New York City and art… two topics that never bore me. In this novel specifically, we peek into the world of performance art, a form of art I didn’t really much think about until I learned of Marina Abramovic's work. To be clear, however, the main focus of this book is the process of aging and its ef......more

This is a promising debut novel from Lisa Hsiao Chen. Chen takes as her inspiration the performance artist Tehching Hsieh, known for a series of durational pieces beginning in the late 1970s. The novel weaves together several strands. The principal story, plot-wise, follows Chen's narrator as she ca......more

i was going over my highlights to write this review, and the ones from the beginning of the book — even though i started reading less than a week ago — felt eerily foreign to me somehow, kind of like when you read old writing and shake your head at what you were saying, because at that point in time......more

Two short passages from Activities of Daily Living: * "The Father was a melancholic. It is the tendency of the melancholic to be faithless to people, as Sontag wrote of Walter Benjamin, that famous melancholic of history. This faithlessness in humanity correlates to the melancholic’s generalized, desp......more

The profound conceptual artworks of Tehching Hsieh are set next to the discomfiting trial of witnessing a parent’s end-of-life. Lisa Hsiao Chen forges perfect chapters with bullseye endings, wears her vast reading lightly, plucks heartstrings, and lights up your brain. A "project" about exceptional......more