You Remind Me of Me

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to read Chaon (“Shawn”), and I’m excited to dig into more. His prose is chewy, yet efficient: I could lounge inside his sentences, let them stretch and snap until I myself feel like elastic. And yet, as the story picked up pace, my hunger to know had me absorbin......more

I loved Dan Chaon’s novel, Await Your Reply. I enjoyed how the interconnected stories all came together to make sense in the end. This novel has a similar format. But the basic premise of this book (at least in my view) is that, as far as the path our life is headed down, the die has been cast from......more

This book left a huge impression on me for several reasons. First, the language was crafted beautifully. Chaon could write a novel about someone sitting and picking their nose, and he would make the language so extraordinary that you would be glued to your seat and in tears by the end. Second, this......more

So far, I've enjoyed the short stories of Chaon more than the novels. The novels stick with you, though. He might be compared to Lorrie Moore for the crystalline style, but his depiction of American life verges on disturbing at times, and reveals the undercurrent of our repressed age, bringing to mi......more

When I grow up one day as a writer, I want my writing to be like Dan Chaon's. This is his debut novel after many years of writing short stories. The craft of short story writing comes through in every sentence of this novel - rich, evocative imagery punches through some of the most economic sentence......more