LATE NIGHT Lit
Seth Meyers continues his Late Night literary salon on Wednesday, featuring Alexander Chee.
The Queen of the Night (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Blackstone Audio) is Chee’s second novel (coming out over a decade after the Whiting Award–winning Edinburgh). It is set during the Second Empire and Belle Epoque Paris and features historic and fictional characters.
As Slate summarizes it, the novel’s main character is:
“Lilliet Berne, a clever, glamorous opera superstar … she sweeps into balls singing show-stopping arias to thunderous applause, yet never speaks a word in public. Lilliet is offered a role written specifically for her by an anonymous composer—an enormous compliment, until she realizes that the opera is based on her own shadowy past … Only four people know her true story, and it must have been one of them who betrayed her. As she hunts for each of the four in turn, she recounts the picaresque sequence of transformations that brought her to the pinnacle of Paris.”
Chee’s appearance follows a round of advance publicity. As we reported earlier, it is an IndieNext pick this month. It has also been selected as one of the year’s “most anticipated” novels by Bustle, Entertainment Weekly, FlavorWire, HuffPost, and The Millions.
NPR calls it “sprawling, soaring, bawdy and plotted like a fine embroidery,” and featured Chee on a recent Weekend Edition Saturday show.
Even Vogue has gotten in on the praise and featured Chee in an interview that highlights, in part, the novel’s lavish detail to the fashion of the era.
All the attention aside, in libraries we checked holds developing but few locales are topping a 3:1 ratio. Meyers may give the book the nudge it seems it still needs to break through.