ALT Texas Book Festival / Feria del Libro de Tejas 2024. Wei Tchou: Little Seed texasbookfestival.org, November 16-17, Downtown Austin

ALT Little Seed in the “Briefy Noted” section of the New Yorker

ALT Little Seed, by Wei Tchou (Deep Vellum/A Strange Object). A family story and a natural history of the fern run in parallel through this memoir, in which chapters alternate between botanical esoterica and descriptions of Tchou's personal life: she grew up in Appalachian Tennessee as the daughter of Chinese immi-grants, and she has a brother who, as an adult, is beset by psychotic episodes. The two narratives initially stay on their separate paths, but eventually Ichou finds graceful moments of glancing association, especially on the vexing topic of identity. "My family is rigid about identification with one another and with the whole," she explains. "We lack the flexibility of taxon-omists, to allow things to break apart and come back together."

ALT Little Seed by Wei Tchou

ALT "A gorgeous, inventive meditation on the passage of time, memory and forgetting, and the ties that bind." —Hua Hsu

ALT "Wei Tchou has written a book that sneaks its way into your suconscious, nudging connections that you did not know existed." —Jay Caspian Kang

ALT "Little Seed is what I want the future of literature to be." —Sam Cohen