Activities of Daily Living

Books

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A Vogue Best Book of the Year One of The Millions' Most Anticipated Books of 2022 A searching, sharply observed debut novel on the interconnection between work and life, loneliness and kinship, and the projects that occupy our time. How do we take stock of a life-by what means, and by what measure? This is the question that preoccupies Alice, a Taiwanese immigrant in her late thirties. In the off-hours from her day job, Alice struggles to create a project about the enigmatic downtown performance artist Tehching Hsieh and his monumental, yearlong 1980s performance pieces. Meanwhile, she becomes the caretaker for her aging stepfather, a Vietnam vet whose dream of making traditional Chinese furniture dissolved in alcoholism and dementia. As Alice roots deeper into Hsieh's radical use of time-in one piece, the artist confined himself to a cell for a year; in the next, he punched a time clock every hour, on the hour, for a year-and his mysterious ...