All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost

Reviews / Votes

"Starred Review: Among the many threads Chang elegantly pursues-the fraught relationships between mentors and students, the value of poetry, the price of ambition-it is her indelible portrait of the loneliness of artistic endeavor that will haunt readers the most in this exquisitely written novel about the poet's lot." -- Booklist "The first woman and first Asian American to be director of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Chang writes from personal history. Her characters are three-dimensional and not predictable, and with her simple, elegant style she achieves a clarity that few writers accomplish.... Chang is an author worth reading now-and watching in the future." -- Library Journal "All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost offers a starkly honest portrait of people caught up in the drive to write and of the personal bargains and self-deceptions that such an ambition can entail. Lan Samantha Chang was brave to write this book, to turn her novelist's eye onto a world she knows intimately, and her bravery pays off in the unflinching final scenes." -- Adam Haslett, author of Union Atlantic "Lucy, Roman, Bernard, and Miranda are characters you won't soon forget. In their passionate, demanding, wrecked, and joyous literary lives, they thrive on their belief in language's absolute authority. This deeply affecting-and elegant-novel by Lan Samantha Chang definitely offers what Leonard Cohen calls his whole career in song: All day and night, versions of the erotic. I wish I could live long enough to discover this novel in an attic trunk a hundred years in the future, and exclaim, so this is what 'poetic education' really meant." -- Howard Norman, author of What Is Left the Daughter "What a lovely, fierce book about love, betrayal, loss, and time's dominion over us all. Fleet, preternaturally attuned to the ebb and flow of personal history, All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost is, well, unforgettable. Lan Samantha Chang sees deeply into her characters, right down to their souls, but she wields her intelligence with the compassion of a master." -- Scott Spencer, author of A Ship Made of Paper