Category: Fiction

@NecessaryFic – I wrote Research Notes for BAD ASIAN abt pop culture like THE HILLS and THE OSBOURNES that inspired the novel. #writingcommunity

Leland Cheuk

“One of the funnest parts of writing my novel about a fictive famed standup comic was the creation of a parallel pop culture that mirrored and coexisted with the pop culture we knew and loved from the decade of the aughts. My protagonist Sirius Lee, a Chinese American, attends a predominantly white high school in Los Angeles that’s featured on a reality show similar to MTV’s Laguna Beach, which ran from 2004 to 2006 and was later spun off into The Hills, which would run for the rest of the decade. In this high school in “Guernica Beach,” Sirius meets the daughter of his eventual comedy mentor Johnny Razzmatazz, who I imagine as a cross between Andrew “Dice” Clay and Ozzy Osbourne. The show Johnny’s on is entitled The Family Razzmatazz, an obvious allusion to The Osbournes, which was a hit on MTV from 2002 to 2005.

Looking back on Laguna Beach and The Osbournes, it’s hard to believe that we watched these silly shows in large numbers.”

Read the rest at Necessary Fiction. 

I rounded up “7 Standup Comedy Memoirs That Will Make You Laugh And Cry” for @electriclit #writingcommunity #readinglists incl. Tiffany Haddish, @aliwong, Steve Martin and others

Leland Cheuk

Writers of literary fiction are supposed to disdain celebrity memoirs. They’re sucking up all the big advances and lowering the bar of what’s supposed to be Literature, right?

But I’ve got a dirty reading secret. I love celebrity memoirs, particularly by standup comedians (and not just because I was doing research for No Good Very Bad Asian, my novel about a fictive famed standup comedian named Sirius Lee). The best standup memoirs can be so raw and honest, revealing uncomfortable truths about life that even the best fiction rarely addresses.

Here are some of my favorites, a mix of books that I read while researching No Good Very Bad Asian and recent entrees into the genre.

Read the rest of the list at Electric Literature.

‘Twas an honor to sit with Brad Listi on @otherppl at @lithub and talk illness, BAD ASIAN, and @713books #writingcommunity #podcasts #literary #indie #publishing

Leland Cheuk

Leland Cheuk is the guest. His new novel, No Good Very Bad Asian, is available from C&R Press.

A MacDowell Colony and Hawthornden Castle Fellow, Cheuk is also the author of the story collection Letters from Dinosaurs (2016) and the novel The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong (2015), which was also published in translation in China (2018). His work has been covered in Buzzfeed, The Paris Review, VICE, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere, and has appeared in publications such as Salon, Catapult, Joyland Magazine, Literary Hub, among other outlets. He is the founder of the indie press 7.13 Books.

Cheuk lives in Brooklyn and teaches at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute.

From the episode:

Leland Cheuk: I’ve talked to friends that went through [chemotherapy], and it seems that they don’t do much. It’s really a choice, that they don’t feel like they want to process what happened that much.

I did toy with writing a nonfiction book about it by interviewing fellow survivors, and they all had different takes on it. They thought about death a lot … saying that they never fear dying despite the horrible things that go on in the process. You’re near death at some point, right? Then some people did not feel like talking or thinking about what’s next.

Brad Listi: Who knows what’s the exact right way. You have to sort of feel it out.

Leland: Right. I had no idea what I was doing. I was just trying to be as real as possible.

Brad: Were you writing through the process?

Leland: Yeah, I was writing this novel. I was in the hospital for three weeks, which is a short amount time. Sometimes you can be there for six to eight weeks. … I started writing shortly after. I found it really difficult to sit in a chair for more than thirty minutes and type. I would get sweaty and start trembling, and I’d realize that my body had enough.

Brad: That level of exertion was too much?

Leland: Yeah. I’m eight inches taller than my wife, and we would be walking up the street, and she’s always complaining that I walk too fast, but she was beating me. The world felt overripe. I could smell everything. Summer in New York City.

…

Brad: I think the general lesson for me would be to move towards people who are suffering than to move away. Even good people move away, and you notice that when shit hits the fan.

Leland: I remember every friend who visited. There were a few that I thought would visit, but they didn’t. Especially when you’re younger, and people aren’t able to deal with that.