Six Memos For Our Millennium: A Craft Reading of Calvino's Vision with M Lin (Master Class)
Given her numerous accolades in the genre, M Lin's career as a fiction writer is surprisingly recent: she began writing prose in September 2020, before which she'd only written screenplays. However, the stories that she has produced in the half-decade mark her as a spellbinding new voice in the contemporary literary sphere.
Exploring the timeless terrain of family, romance, and childhood from a wide range of characters, M Lin distinguishes herself as a writer that never loses sight of the society that her stories inhabit.
In 1985, just weeks before the visionary writer was to deliver a series of lectures at Harvard University as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Italo Calvino passed away from a sudden stroke. It would not surprise his readers, however, that in the final months of his life, Calvino was speculating about the future of literature--imagining the endless time ahead, not his own, but one to be lived and written about by writers yet to be born. In the foreword of what later published as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Calvino writes, "My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it." Now, more than a quarter century into our millennium, has contemporary literature unfolded as Calvino hoped--or feared? In this class, we will interpret the five key concepts Calvino proposed--Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity--through writings of the twenty-first century, and reflect on how these ideas might translate into craft principles that we can attend to in our own work. We will also think together about what Calvino's unwritten lecture on Consistency might have explored. Reading Six Memos for the Next Millennium in advance is encouraged, but not required.
M Lin is a Chinese writer and translator living in the US. Born and raised in Beijing, she writes in English as her second language. Her first book, The Memory Museum, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in April 2026, including stories that appeared in Ploughshares, Swamp Pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023. Her nonfiction and translations can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere.
Stretching from the present day to the near future, from China to America and beyond, M Lin’s piercing and melodious debut captures the spirit of China’s One-Child Generation as its characters navigate homes and cultures, hopes and contradictions, survival and resistance. These frank, tender, and playful stories offer profound insight into the ambivalence of migration, the perverse ways race and class can operate, and what it means to be Chinese today.
The collection begins with “Scenes from Childhood,” in which a lonely, elderly woman in a dystopian reality remembers her grandfather’s village. In “Magic, or Something Less Assuring,” a politically divided couple goes on a divorce honeymoon in Morocco. “You Won’t Read This in the News” features four migrant workers during one night of petty theft and connection. In “Tough Egg,” a filmmaker thwarted by censorship untangles her fraught relationship to motherhood. Other stories portray a photographer reuniting with her first love in Beijing; the historic White Paper protests that ended the zero-COVID policy; and generations into the future, a newly instated Memory Museum where two sensory architects share their vision for a utopian world.
With daring political and creative commitment, The Memory Museum brims with joy even as Lin exposes the knife’s edge between powerlessness and agency, pain and intimacy, our memories and our futures.