Acadia was founded in 1916 by Woodrow Wilson as the first Eastern national park, aided by rich men, often with middle initials, the ‘rusticators,’ as they were known then, the first of our wealthy out-of-state visitors. Alexander Chee Read Quote
One of the things that’s really important in ‘Queen of the Night’ is how people communicate with their clothes. Alexander Chee Read Quote
I knew I wanted the parties in ‘The Queen of the Night’ to be convincing, beautiful, and also dramatic: situations where significant things happened on a scale that was both grand and intimate. There were several texts that helped me think about how to do this, and one of the most important ones was Charlotte Bronte’s novel ‘Villette.’ Alexander Chee Read Quote
The qualities that make parties such a nightmare for people – and also so pleasurable – make them incredibly important inside of fiction. There’s a chaos agent quality to them: You just don’t know who’s going to be there or why. You could run into an old enemy, an old friend, an old friend who’s become an enemy. Alexander Chee Read Quote
In some ways, in ‘The Queen of the Night,’ I’m writing about some of the experience that I had with ‘Edinburgh’ where I was entirely unable to speak about what had happened to me as a child, but I could read from the novel. Alexander Chee Read Quote
The best relatively contemporary portrayal of a courtesan that I’ve ever seen was probably in ‘Children of Paradise,’ a film that was made during the Nazi occupation of France, made in secret actually. Alexander Chee Read Quote
Paul Lisicky, in his new memoir, ‘The Narrow Door,’ describes losing his old friend, the novelist Denise Gess, and his husband, the acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty, within a year of each other: Gess to cancer, at the age of 57, and Doty to another man. Alexander Chee Read Quote
ACT UP was trying to explain to Americans that AIDS could affect all of us: that health care that ended once your disease was expensive could affect more than gay men with HIV or AIDS. We were trying to tell them about the future – a future they didn’t yet see and would be forced to accept if they failed to act. Alexander Chee Read Quote
Historical fiction was not – and is not – meant to supplant literature from the period it describes. As a veteran of the Crimea, Tolstoy wrote ‘War and Peace’ to match his own internal sense of the truth of the Napoleonic wars, to dramatize what he felt literature from that period had failed to describe. Alexander Chee Read Quote
War and Peace’ holds a strange place in literary history, participating in the crowning of realism as a substantial and serious literary mode in America, even as the novel also contributed to the argument that historical fiction could be by nature dangerous, illegitimate, and inaccurate. Alexander Chee Read Quote
