Memory Museum: Stories by M Lin

“An astounding talent with an unforgettable voice. The Memory Museum is a book for the ages.”—R. O. Kwon

We are very excited to host M Lin for an event celebrating the release of Memory Museum: Stories. For this event, M Lin will be joined in conversation by Ananda Lima. This event is co-presented with the Chicago Review of Books.

Stretching from the present to the future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin’s piercing debut collection depicts characters finding beauty amidst the disorientation of migration, the contradictions of living between cultures, the perverse realities of race and class, and the delicate dance between survival and resistance. In “Scenes from Childhood,” an elderly woman in a dystopian reality is visited by forgotten memories of her grandfather’s village. In “Magic, or Something Less Assuring,” a fraying couple goes on a divorce honeymoon in Morocco to surprising results. “You Won’t Read This in the News” imagines four migrant workers and petty thieves who forge an unshakable connection across one desperate night. A filmmaker thwarted by censorship untangles her fraught relationship to motherhood and artmaking in “Tough Egg.” And in a newly instated Memory Museum generations into the future, two sensory architects weave a moving tapestry of love and radical hope. Brimming with joy, insight, and emotional power, The Memory Museum unveils M Lin as an irresistible new talent with fearless political and stylistic imagination.

M Lin is a Chinese writer and translator living in the US. Born and raised in Beijing, she writes in English as her second language. Her fiction has been published in Ploughshares, Swamp Pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023. Her nonfiction and translations can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. The Memory Museum is her first book.

Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the Story Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal, and named Best of the Year by Library Journal, Electric Literature, Debutiful, among others. The New York Times calls it “a remarkable debut that announces the arrival of a towering talent in speculative fiction.”

The Chicago Review of Books is a publication of StoryStudio Chicago dedicated to making the literary conversation more inclusive by covering diverse genres, presses, voices, and mediums; shining a light on Chicago’s literary scene; and serving as a forum for literature in the Midwest.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com by no later than 14 days before the event. For other access needs please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.