11/27/2023

Ko (The Leavers) spans past, present, and future with the astute story of three Chinese American women from the New York City tristate area over the course of their lives. As a teen in 1980s suburbia, Giselle Chin knows she wants to be an artist, and that her performance art will provide “a container for the uncertainty and overwhelm of the future.” At Chinese language school, she meets Jackie Ong, who’s drawn to computers and feels “more kinship to machines” than people. At a party, the two encounter Ellen Ng, who later gets involved in political activism and moves to a community squat in New York City called Sola. As Giselle gains fame in the art world, she wonders whether celebrity will compromise her true vision, and if so, which one she’ll have to abandon. Jackie, too, must decide what really matters to her as she attempts to balance integrity and success while creating an online social network just as the internet begins to take off, and Ellen worries Sola will be undone by gentrification. For much of the narrative, the women’s individual story lines feel a bit disjointed, but Ko brings them together in a satisfying final act in the 2040s, when America is an authoritarian police state. This is a worthy follow-up to Ko’s striking debut. Agent: Ayesha Pande, Pande Literary. (Mar.)

Praise for Memory Piece:

"Adventurous...Lisa Ko's socially astute and formally innovative second novel, Memory Piece, takes readers back to the dawn of the Internet...gritty and refreshingly girl-centric...It documents the last days of people being untrackable, able to disappear, and for this alone lingers in the imagination." –The New York Times

"Limber, ambitious...Memory Piece asks what hopes are worth clinging to, what parts of society are worth participating in, what powers are worth putting in the energy to fight. It belongs to an American literary tradition that includes Dana Spiotta, George Saunders, and their patron saint, Don DeLillo: writers whose characters sense that their lives happen at the whim of forces too enormous to understand or evade, but set out to dodge them anyway." –The Atlantic

“Ko…draws characters with such deftness that they feel wholly alive. Details add up over time to create dazzling dimensionality. We see the characters as they see themselves, and as they see each other, allowing for a panoramic view.”–The Washington Post

“A sharp novel that spans the past, present, and future of a friendship.”–TIME

"A moving, strikingly evocative exploration of New York's art, tech, and activism scenes across the decades."–Vogue, "Best Books of 2024"

"Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad meets Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life—if the latter were 500+ pages shorter, infinitely less traumatic, and centered on a triad of Asian American women."–Oprah Daily

"Lisa Ko has brought us one of those rare, sumptuous tales of art and friendship that feels both universal and inimitable."–Elle, "Best (and Most Anticipated) Fiction Books of 2024"

"A moving, sharply observed portrait of friendship and discovering what it means to live a worthwhile life—whether or not it's anything like what we'd hoped."–Town & Country, "Most Anticipated Books of Spring"

“A poignant meditation on late-stage capitalism: what it means to exist in an age of surveillance and government tracking, what it means to create art in an era where identity itself is commodified, and what it means to find purpose.” –Electric Literature

“Ko’s prose is beautiful and sharp, and her ability to shapeshift through a range of tones makes the novel a pleasure to read. . . a compelling, often chilling and beautifully observant novel about what connects us to, and disconnects us from, each other.” –BookPage

"The novel serves as an archive of our past and a vision for what’s to come, hauntingly beautiful in a way that’s both nostalgic and dystopian. In essence, Memory Piece is about the power of remembering, especially when it’s painful.”–Booklist

“Ko spans past, present, and future with the astute story of three Asian American women from the New York City tristate area over the course of their lives…A worthy follow-up to Ko’s striking debut.” –Publishers Weekly

“Wild and wonderful, punk and propulsive, Memory Piece is about three friends growing from girlhood into a sinister new world. It is about authenticity, surveillance, capitalism, queerness, and the internet. It is about—it is—everything.” –Julia Phillips, National Book Award finalist author of The Disappearing Earth

“Evocative and luminous. Ko once again introduces us to people we want to know deeply, then as always, delivers that and beyond. A glorious writer.”—Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award winning author of Red at the Bone

“Remarkable . . . vividly captures the urgency of youth, and becomes a heartbreaking elegy for a communal, almost utopian approach to urban life.” –Rumaan Alam, National Book Award finalist for Leave the World Behind

“Dazzlingly inventive and knowing, Memory Piece is a bold and affecting novel about resistance, solidarity, and friendship.”—Dana Spiotta, National Book Award finalist and author of Eat the Document

“A group portrait of three women who wrest meaning from a world that is closing down around them, Memory Piece is bright with defiance, intelligence, and stubborn love. To spend time with these characters is a gift.” —C Pam Zhang, bestselling author of How Much of These Hills is Gold

03/29/2024

Ko focuses on three friends who met in the 1980s as part of a network of Asian American families. Raised in New Jersey, Giselle eventually finds international success as a performance artist. Jackie, a computer wiz, enters the dot-com world, makes a fortune, and ends up disenchanted. In her role as a community activist and publisher of zines, Ellen organizes the takeover and rehabilitation of an empty building on the Lower East Side. The novel moves from the 1980s through the early 2000s to a dystopian police state in 2040, which limits access to food, housing, and travel. Throughout the decades, the three women's enduring friendship sustains them as they deal with familial expectations and the pressures of negotiating careers, romantic relationships, and the social and political upheaval around them. Some readers might find that the sections appear disjointed, and historical background occasionally overwhelms the narrative. VERDICT Ko, whose debut novel, The Leavers, was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award, contextualizes her characters' lives in relation to major social and historical events over the decades. This is an ambitious and serious novel.—Jacqueline Snider

Multiple Earphones Award winner Eunice Wong performs this novel about a decades-long friendship between three Asian American women. Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng come of age in the '80s and '90s, trying to make their way in the world by creating art, starting a business, and becoming a neighborhood activist, respectively. As the narrative moves into the near future, we follow the three friends through life changes, but they always find a way back to each other. Wong's performance captures the friends' perspectives, giving each a unique narrative voice. In Wong's narration, one friend sounds brusque and efficient, while another's voice is laid-back and easygoing. Wong's outstanding performance is one of the must-listens of the year. K.D.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

2023-12-16
Three girls walk into a bedroom in the New Jersey suburbs in 1983...and many decades later, into a dystopian future.

Soon-to-be seventh graders Giselle Chin and Jackie Ong are hiding from a Fourth of July party, making prank calls in the host’s bedroom, when Ellen Ng walks in and asks if there’s anything else to do for fun around here. The three wander across the street into a parallel gathering and help themselves to someone else’s hamburgers. “This was the beginning, what Giselle would describe, years later...as...the SEEDS of our aesthetics...we saw each other for who we were // masked weirdos, undercover pranksters.” This ominously pretentious-sounding observation appears in one of the year-long conceptual artworks Giselle eventually becomes famous for: Mall Piece, 1995-96; Memory Piece, 1996-97; and Death Piece, 1999-2000. Meanwhile, Jackie grows up to be a visionary software developer, creating a site where people keep online diaries for public consumption and taking part in New York City’s Silicon Alley dot-com boom. Ellen continues her rabble-rousing ways, publishing a zine and then establishing a squat on the Lower East Side. Though they lose track of each other from time to time, the three come to realize that “friendships were circular, that you could never fully lose touch.” After moving their stories across the bridge to the new millennium, the narrative leaps ahead to the 2040s, where the political situation has become a nightmare, though not a particularly intriguing one, and supporting characters proliferate while ones we care about fade from view. Though full of interesting action and sharp observation, Ko’s follow-up to The Leavers (2017) fails to whip up much narrative tension beyond the mystery created by the photographs that appear from time to time, captioned with complicated archival labels. In the end, the book’s elaborate conceptual structure dominates the characters who inhabit it.

A socially conscious novel of art and ideas.