Yearly Archives: 2015
Bay Area Reporter
Still Life illuminates the ways we grieve, how we make sense of tragedy and devastating loss, and how a broken family can escape a heartbreaking past … In deft strokes, Sie both skewers and celebrates culture, with Las Vegas almost becoming a character infused with artifice and promise.
Lambda Literary
An innovative and engaging first novel…adults will be transfixed by this story of family dysfunction and the redemption of a teen coming out.
Catching Up
Oh, but it’s been a long long time since I’ve written— I’d like to say it’s because I’ve been on a whirlwind tour promoting my book, but really it’s just been Life: a new writing class at Los Angeles Writer’s Workshop, the Olympic marathon that is Thanksgiving, high school applications and tours, the annual clusterfuck of holiday events and shopping and year-end minutiae. However, there have been a few work-related events to savor in the dwindling glow of 2015
Here, There, and Everywhere
A flurry of October events that has left me a bit discombobulated but ever so satisfied… The month began with a return to the hometown of my adulthood—Chicago. I’d imagined a homecoming similar to Bette Midler’s in “The Rose”—I would get up to do a reading, start singing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” and collapse (cue plaintive piano […]
Asian American Literature Fans
James Sie’s Still Live Las Vegas stands tall alongside a number of other glorious debuts… Sie’s novel is a fascinating hybrid of family dysfunction, graphic narrative, and the traditional bildungsroman.
LA Review of Books Podcast
Colin Marshall gives an in-depth interview with illustrator Sungyoon Choi and me about working on the novel together.
Electric Literature— “The Magic Behind the Artifice”
An interview by Heather Scott Partington for Electric Literature.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
A swirl of mythology and collective memory, a jumble of times and places overlaid, like half-dreamt palimpsests, on one young man’s circumscribed world…At rendering matters of grief and of memory, Mr. Sie and Ms. Choi are masterful. So too do they craft a gripping narrative…Mr. Sie’s emotional realism ensured a riveting read.
And Now for Something Completely Different…
All right, let’s take a brief intermission from all this book talk, all right? Time to get my head out of my arse (more on that in the next post) and see what else is new and exciting in the world: Games and Baking Shows! Imagine reading the entirety of Moby Dick, one phrase at a time, and […]