September 30th, 2025 — Happy publication day to Lana Lin‘s (CRF 2003) The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam (Dorothy), Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction! Lana’s second book draws inspiration from Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Almost a century later, Lana has reinvented the form blending memoir, biography, and a critical examination of themes like queer love, race, and gender, to tell the story of her own life and the life of her partner.
The National Book Foundation writes, “At heart a candid chronicle of her partner Lan Thao’s life journey from Việt Nam during the war, and her own troubled history as a gender-queer Taiwanese American, Lin draws in subjects as varied as photography, cancer, tropical fruit, 9/11, and Eve Sedgwick’s eyeglasses, weaving an intimate landscape of living that is also a critical investigation of race and gender.”
On October 1st, Lana will be in conversation with Monique Truong at Books Are Magic in Brooklyn (Montague St. location).