Congratulations to novelist Alexander Chee, our featured fiction faculty member on our 2016 Summer in Granada Writing Retreat, for his new novel The Queen of the Night, which debuts in bookstores on February 2, 2016! Alexander Chee will be teaching during our Summer in Granada, Andalucía, Spain Writing Retreat (July 28-Aug 5, 2016).

Alexander Chee was born in Rhode Island, and raised in South Korea, Guam and Maine. He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Ledig House, the Hermitage and Civitella Ranieri. His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection.

In The Queen of the Night, Lilliet Berne is a sensation of the Paris Opera, a legendary soprano with every accolade except an original role, every singer’s chance at immortality. When one is finally offered to her, she realizes with alarm that the libretto is based on a hidden piece of her past. Only four could have betrayed her: one is dead, one loves her, one wants to own her. And one, she hopes, never thinks of her at all.

Read an excerpt from the first chapter of the novel below, and the full first chapter on Longreads:

“…I seemed a stranger to myself, a changeling placed here in my life at some point I couldn’t remem­ber, and the glass of the mirror at the entrance to the palace seemed made from the same amber of the dream that surrounded me, a life that was not life, and which I could not seem to escape no matter where I went or what I sang.

And so their celebration of me that night at the ball, sincere as it was, felt as if it were happening in the life neighboring mine, visible through a glass.

I tell you I was distracted, but it was much more than that. For I was also focused intensely, waiting for one thing and one thing only, my attention turned toward something I couldn’t quite see but was sure was there, coming for me through the days ahead. I’d had a premonition in accepting the role of Marguerite that, in returning to Paris this time, I would be here for a meeting with my destiny. Here I would find what would transform me, what would return me to life and make this life the paradise I was so sure it should be…”

Here is Chee reading an excerpt from the novel at Franklin Park Bar and Beer Garden in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Read more here. Join Alexander Chee for his talk at the PEN/Faulkner Reading Series at Bus Boy & Poets on February 11, 2016!