An Evening with Anelise and Angela Chen

Join us in Ann Arbor for a compelling conversation between authors and sisters Anelise Chen and Angela Chen. Their conversation will cover both of their most recent works, which include Clam Down, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in the style of memoir, and After School 課後, a text-image book that unpacks the culture of buxiban (after school tutoring centers) in predominantly East Asian communities in the San Gabriel Valley, CA.

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About Clam Down:

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • In this wondrously unusual memoir, a woman retreats into her shell in the aftermath of her divorce, and must choose between the pleasures and the perils of a closed-up life—a transformation fable from an acclaimed 5 Under 35 National Book Foundation honoree.

“A marvel and a delight . . . This is a book that will stay with me forever.”—Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters

ONE OF CHICAGO TRIBUNE’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: VULTURE, ELECTRIC LIT, SHELF AWARENESS

We’ve all heard the story about waking up as a cockroach—but what if a crisis turned you into a clam? After the dissolution of her marriage, a writer is transformed into a “clam” via typo after her mother keeps texting her to “clam down.” The funny if unhelpful command forces her to ask what it means to “clam down”—to retreat, hide, close up, and stay silent. Idiomatically, we are said to “clam up” when we can’t speak, and to “come out of our shell” when we reemerge, transformed.

In order to understand her path, the clam digs into examples of others who have embraced lives of reclusiveness and extremity. Finally, she confronts her own “clam genealogy” to interview her dad, who disappeared for a decade to write a mysterious accounting software called Shell Computing. By excavating his past to better understand his decisions, she learns not only how to forgive him but also how to move on from her own wounds of abandonment and insecurity.

Using a genre-defying structure and written in novelistic prose that draws from art, literature, and natural history, Anelise Chen unfolds a complex story of interspecies connectedness, in which humans learn lessons of adaptation and survival from their mollusk kin. While it makes sense in certain situations to retreat behind fortified walls, the choice to do so also exacts a price. What is the price of building up walls? How can one take them back down when they are no longer necessary?

Not able to join us? Order your copy here: https://schulerbooks.com/book/9781984801869

About Anelise Chen:

Anelise Chen is the author of the hybrid memoir Clam Down: A Metamorphosis, a 2026 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Memoir or Autobiography, and a novel, So Many Olympic Exertions (2017), a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She is a 5 under 35 honoree from the National Book Foundation. She teaches fiction at Columbia University and lives with her family in New Haven, Connecticut.

About After School 課後:

Angela Chen's text-image book After School 課後 brings together autobiography, photographs, collage, and archival documents to unpack the culture of buxiban (after school tutoring centers) in predominantly East Asian communities in the San Gabriel Valley, CA. It tells the story of her family’s struggle to run Futurelink, a buxiban business, against the historical backdrop of anti-Asian violence and considers the after school as a paradoxical space of discipline and care, assimilation and cultural preservation, competition and community.

About Angela Chen:

Angela Chen is a Taiwanese American artist, writer, and educator from the ethnoburbs of the San Gabriel Valley, CA. Her work explores the immigrant experience and uses assemblage as a metaphor for diasporic identity. Chen received her MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan and previously taught at Rice University and New York University.