Lisa Lee is the recipient of the Marianne Russo Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Center
for Fiction, and a Pushcart Prize. She has received other fellowships and awards from Kundiman, Millay Arts, Hedgebrook, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Tin House, Jentel Artist Residency, and the Korea Foundation. Her work has appeared in
Ploughshares,
VIDA,
North American Review,
Sycamore Review,
Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Lee holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles.
Lee's new novel is
American Han.
At Electric Lit she tagged
seven books in which we see "characters who look to their brothers and sisters with uncertainty, envy, and love, looking for clues as to who and how they should be."
One title on the list:
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
Danny Conroy and his older sister Maeve are kicked out of their childhood home—a sprawling mansion on the outskirts of Philadelphia—by their stepmother after their father’s death. From the age of 10 until her death, Maeve is a mother figure to Danny, assuming all responsibility for raising him. Hellbent on getting revenge on their stepmother, who inherited everything except an educational trust set aside for the children, Maeve encourages Danny to attend an expensive boarding school, then Columbia, and eventually medical school. Danny does as Maeve wishes even though his interests lie elsewhere. Like nothing else I’ve read, this novel conveys the slow accretion of choices by which one sibling’s life, almost imperceptibly, can be subsumed by the other’s obsessions.
Read about
another entry on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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