Reading & Conversation: M Lin "The Memory Museum" (with Robert Yune)

It is our joy and honor at White Whale to celebate debut authors! We are thrilled to welcome M Lin to White Whale to celebrate her debut, The Memory Museum, an expansive, unforgettable short story collection centering the lives and experiences of Chinese millennial women. Her story “Shangri-La” is set in Pittsburgh! M Lin will be joined in conversation by Robert Yune.

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

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.

Praise

“These stories are a treasure—moving, kaleidoscopic, ingenious. The Memory Museum marks the arrival of a bold and brilliant voice.”—Madeleine Thien, author of The Book of Records

“M Lin builds worlds bursting with all the complexities that humans hold—longing, hunger of all sorts, and the joys that make impossible any true shunning of the grief we must feel for having loved and lived.”—Dantiel W. Moniz, author of Milk Blood Heat

“Deeply felt and grounded in an intimate acquaintance with contemporary China, these wide-ranging stories portray villagers, protesters, artists, and petty thieves alike with empathy and grace. Nothing is easy for them, and the questions they raise are not easy for us. What an absorbing, probing debut! Wonderful.”—Gish Jen, author of Bad Bad Girl

“A book of astonishing vitality and vision, The Memory Museum encourages us to ask: What is and what ought to be the relationship between self and society?”—Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief

ROBERT YUNE's fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Pleiades, The Kenyon Review, and The Los Angeles Review, among others. His debut story collection, Impossible Children, was published in 2019 by Sarabande Books. He lives in West Virginia. You can find more information at robertyune.com.

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.

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