{"product_id":"the-autobiography-of-h-lan-thao-lam-isbn-9781948980296","title":"The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam","description":"\u003cb\u003eLonglisted for the 2025 National Book Award in Nonfiction\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSituated between memoir, social criticism, and conceptual art, \u003ci\u003eThe Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam \u003c\/i\u003eis an incisive response to a modernist classic and an affecting exploration of the poetics and politics of our times.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn her 1933 \u003ci\u003eThe Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas\u003c\/i\u003e, Gertrude Stein invented a new literary form by narrating her own story from the perspective of her partner, blurring the lines between portrait and self-portrait. Almost a century later, experimental filmmaker and artist Lana Lin has resurrected Stein’s project to tell a different story of queer love, life, and artistic collaboration.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt 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.“The condition of invisibility, of existing outside of (and at the whims of) a prevailing racial binary, is a familiar aspect of the Asian American condition. Lin brilliantly weaves the seeming impossibilities of this ‘Nobody’ position into the fabric of her \u003ci\u003eAutobiography\u003c\/i\u003e.” — Adrian Lu, \u003ci\u003eThe Adroit Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Longlisted for the National Book Award, and a triumph for the small woman-centered Dorothy, a publishing project, \u003ci\u003eThe Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam\u003c\/i\u003e is an absorbing work commemorating 25 years of queer love and artistic partnership.” — Reginald Harris, \u003ci\u003eThe Gay \u0026amp; Lesbian Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It’s a brilliant embodiment of the way two lives mesh together over time and a poignant reminder that perhaps the best way to be loved is to be seen.” — \u003ci\u003eChicago Reader\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Lana Lin uses an oblique style of autobiography pioneered by Gertrude Stein in which the writer recounts their story through the eyes of their partner, whose story is just as central. It turns the standard recitation of events into a meditation on the nature of memory and the way our lives are so inextricably intertwined.” — Shelbi Polk, \u003ci\u003eShondaland\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Lyrical prose, palpable love, and formal audacity coalesce to make this a must-read.” — \u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e, starred review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Experimental artist, filmmaker, and writer, Lana Lin, uses the literary form invented by Gertrude Stein in \u003ci\u003eThe Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas\u003c\/i\u003e to tell the story of her 25-year queer partnership and artistic collaboration. Narrated through the eyes of her partner, readers follow Lan Thao from her youth in Vietnam, her years in Canada after the Vietnam War, and the couple’s first encounter in New York City in \u003ci\u003eThe Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam\u003c\/i\u003e—an exploration of cancer, queerness, anti-Asian hate, and the delights and challenges that have connected the artists’ lives for decades.” — National Book Award Judges\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Lin’s ingenious and absorbingly tender book meditates on dyadic identity while honoring the miracle and the mundaneness of bonded life.\" — Megan Milks,\u003ci\u003e 4Columns\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The spaciousness to invent (and deconstruct) the self is Lin’s most compelling quality as a writer and filmmaker. In the short film \u003ci\u003eUnidentified Vietnam No. 18\u003c\/i\u003e, an addendum to Lin + Lam’s first shared project concerning the historiography of 1960s propaganda films, a ghostly figure fades in and out of a mausoleum-like hallway, obscuring itself at will; Lin does the same with this wondrous little text, peregrinating across continents, anatomies, and identities as both herself and her lover, as stalwart narrator and evasive subject. She resolves at the finish, “I am I, Lan Thao Lam, and I am Not-I, Lana Lin,” or, \u003ci\u003eI am the you that is in me\u003c\/i\u003e.” — Saffron Maeve, \u003ci\u003eThe Believer\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“To pay homage to another writer, especially such a famous one, in the way Lin does here, with clear-eyed curiosity and appreciation without adulation, is an exciting project. The resulting text can teach us a lot about how we might relate to our elders, both in artistic and in political movements. Instead of either wholeheartedly emulating them or discarding them completely, Lin shows we can interact with their work with a twinned sense of kinship and of criticism, and always with an eye toward telling our own stories in our own ways.” — H Felix Chau Bradley, \u003ci\u003eXtra\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A love story, a litany, a catalog of observations, a guidebook of emotions, a ghost story, a map, a travelogue, a critique of authenticity, and a search for home, \u003ci\u003eThe Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam\u003c\/i\u003e lives in the transition between loneliness and connection. Invoking Gertrude Stein’s refusal of fixity while indicting her racist assumptions, Lana Lin creates a text that swims between personal history, art criticism, and collage. This is a book that plays with memory, grief, and solitude to reveal the rituals of intimacy that sustain a creative life.” — Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of \u003ci\u003eTouching the Art\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“In her brilliant revision of the queer archive, Lana Lin not only brings the understory of the Asian diaspora to the surface but into luminous frame. \u003ci\u003eThe Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam\u003c\/i\u003e is a testament to our different histories and to how, through shared stories and everyday habits, we merge and become each other over time. If you asked me to give you a gift through which you could discover yourself in others, I would offer you this book.” — Julietta Singh, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Breaks\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Excited to read this! I would 1000% have bought this for the cover alone but Lana Lin is brilliant \u0026amp; I’m excited.” — Andrea Lawlor\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A fresh take on a dual biography.” — \u003ci\u003eKirkus\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Taking inspiration from Gertrude Stein’s \u003ci\u003eThe Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas\u003c\/i\u003e, Lin chronicles her partner Lan Thao’s life and work in this genre-defying portrait.” — \u003ci\u003eThe Millions\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eLana Lin\u003c\/b\u003e is a writer, artist, and filmmaker based in New York and Connecticut. She is the author of the book \u003ci\u003eFreud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Fractured Subjectivity in the Face of Cancer\u003c\/i\u003e and film and video works including \u003ci\u003eThe Cancer Journals Revisited\u003c\/i\u003e. Her various works and collaborative projects (with Lan Thao Lam as “Lin + Lam”) have exhibited at festivals and art and educational spaces throughout the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum, and New Museum, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Gasworks, London; the Taiwan International Documentary Festival and Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute, New Taipei City; Arko Art Center, Korean Arts Council, Seoul; and the 2018 Busan Biennale. Having had three years of psychoanalytic training before dropping out, she sometimes still dreams of becoming a psychoanalyst one day.","brand":"Dorothy, a publishing project","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233621717221,"sku":"NP9781948980296","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781948980296.jpg?v=1767738228","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-autobiography-of-h-lan-thao-lam-isbn-9781948980296","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}