Photo Credit: Kayla Smith

I’m delighted to share that my forthcoming novel, Marimo, Mon Amour, won the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction (University of Alabama/FC2), selected by K-Ming Chang. It’s about an obscure poet and dumpling-maker who lives with a pet moss ball, Marimo, in Alphabet City. She serves as the Minister of Loneliness under a futuristic regime governed by the Bureau of Misidentification, riddled by forbidden words, and plagued by absentia.

Release date: September 2026
Available for Pre-Order: University of Alabama/FC2.

“A recipe rondo, a (paisley) pillow book of the plague, and a memorial to a time so recent as to be already forgotten, Karen An-hwei Lee gives us a reminder, written in her prose of exquisite and wise turnings, of alternate terms for isolation and contagion and rapture (and hygge and mamihlapinatapai). A natural city-world within which a timeless yearning sings amidst vibrating static rest — read the brilliant Lee, an Emissary of Bliss, so you can know what language can do.”
– Eugene Lim, author Space Bar, Search History, and Dear Cyborgs

“A natural habitat of language. An abecedarian cake-walk between verse and prose.  Into what world could this possibly be?  Book me a flight. These floating words are the beasts of dreams. This is Karen An-hwei Lee’s Ministry of Loveliness.” – Diane Glancy, author of Lazarus, the Intended Writings and Claiming Breath, winner of the American Book Award

“What starts off as a plague journal narrated by a chibi Rabelais…becomes by way of limitless lists, alliteration, and logophilia something darker and more serious, a meditation on meaning, death, and God in the manner of Donne and the Metaphysicals, scaled through the whimsy and universal wanderings of the Calvino of Cosmicomics—that is to say, all wrapped up in Karen An-hwei Lee’s singular vision, a defining work from one of America’s purest products.“
– Alvin Lu, author of Daydreamers