The Memory Museum: Stories

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

M Lin was born in Beijing and now lives in New York, writing in English as a second language. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Joyland, The New York Times, and other publications.

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.

Graywolf Press

9781644453858