https://www.aubereylescure.com/about daily 1.0 2025-12-06 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/c37a9ed8-027b-4bb0-b9ad-cd024af18f22/P5010050+2.JPG About Photo by An Zi https://www.aubereylescure.com/news daily 0.75 2025-02-25 https://www.aubereylescure.com/news/river-east-river-west-paperback-launch-party monthly 0.5 2025-02-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/eb70d949-d15a-4193-a0b7-c0e59d4bb5af/paperback+launch+poster+%282160+x+1080+px%29+%281%29.png News & Events - River East, River West Paperback Launch Party - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.aubereylescure.com/news/shortlisted-for-the-womens-prize-for-fiction-2024 monthly 0.5 2024-05-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/fa99273e-c075-49c0-8f8b-8ccd5fc192a4/GME0JSzXMAAY5-4.jpeg News & Events - Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024 - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.aubereylescure.com/news/river-east-river-west-book-tour-dates monthly 0.5 2024-01-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/2d5ee4a8-4e0f-4e3d-bce0-70a357b7fffe/RERW+Book+Tour+Dates.png News & Events - River East, River West Book Tour Dates - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.aubereylescure.com/news/river-east-river-west-to-be-published-in-the-uk-by-duckworth-books monthly 0.5 2023-11-16 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/78b02b75-3889-4568-9759-8286031afaa6/River_East_River_West_cover_Thumb.jpg News & Events - River East, River West to be published in the UK by Duckworth Books - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.aubereylescure.com/news/komcef7uqp3sxfnc9prn061c87shy8 monthly 0.5 2022-05-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/2e77a9f4-6223-46db-b208-5f28e9a836d7/51UxT5hQT2L._SX331_BO1%2C204%2C203%2C200_.jpg News & Events - Selected for Best American Essays 2022 - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.aubereylescure.com/blog-1 daily 0.75 2022-05-22 https://www.aubereylescure.com/blog-1/Blog Post Title One-5et4g monthly 0.5 2020-08-27 https://www.aubereylescure.com/blog-1/blog-post-title-two-xd4jj monthly 0.5 2020-05-20 https://www.aubereylescure.com/blog-1/blog-post-title-three-hnde9 monthly 0.5 2020-05-20 https://www.aubereylescure.com/blog-1/blog-post-title-four-cf6mz monthly 0.5 2020-05-20 https://www.aubereylescure.com/dispatches daily 0.75 2024-09-18 https://www.aubereylescure.com/dispatches/aix-montreux-villa-triste monthly 0.5 2023-09-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/a87ce9ac-55c6-40fa-b136-d1c214cdd352/unnamed.jpg Dispatches - Aix, Montreux, Villa Triste - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.aubereylescure.com/dispatches/pacific monthly 0.5 2022-05-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/fbd42e24-6deb-45f3-bbaa-c8579f827182/IMG_3750.jpg Dispatches - Dispatch from the Pacific - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.aubereylescure.com/contact daily 0.75 2024-02-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/a1098ba1-d6ec-4227-a971-f20155806a33/1B635769-AA7A-42A8-887C-895016F41279.jpeg Contact For writing and editing inquiries or book club appearances, please send me an email at aube.reylescure (at) gmail.com. For media inquiries, please contact Emily Fisher at emily.fisher@harpercollins.com https://www.aubereylescure.com/book daily 0.75 2025-06-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/9c0992be-3269-4de6-831f-9060b197eb35/91A6HnHrGBL._SL1500_.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/33b25cbd-2507-4172-8501-5422375e95b7/River+East%2C+River+West+3DBookshot.png https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing daily 0.75 2025-12-06 https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/40mile-walk-to-walden monthly 0.5 2021-07-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/1626346144237-QA7M1DQK9UF7ZX5IILFQ/IMG_0918-1000x750.jpeg Writing - 40-Mile Walk to Walden “At dawn, I set off to walk 40 miles. It's summer in New England and the sky is a pale pastel. Off the quiet Somerville street where I’ve found a temporary home with a friend, the morning traffic is humming to a slow start, and the first Dunkin’ customers are groggily pulling into half-empty lots. My cellphone buzzes. The leaves on the Minuteman path sway like green tendrils just as my mother, on the phone from China and ready for bed, says in a strangled voice: ‘You’re doing what?’ ‘Walking to Walden Pond and back. I’m raising money for the National Immigration Law Center.’ I’ve walked long distances before, but this is a record. I want to tell my mother: you don’t know how often I walk alone, and very far, aimlessly. When many retreated to their family homes during the pandemic, I could not — I have no family in the U.S. I made it through six months in a cheap monthly rental in Inman Square, then drifted in and out of temporary stays with friends. When I walk, the miles help settle the swirling thoughts that drive me outwards: a yearning to feel at home in my body, because there is nowhere else to call home.” https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/armadillo-island monthly 0.5 2025-02-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/eb44b6f5-efac-40dd-843b-1e833ddc4540/jessica-furtney-shsGPF3dGrA-unsplash.jpg Writing - Armadillo Island - Armadillo Island “Colt said that to make up for it he’d take me on a trip. I chose Savannah because I’d always loved the name; I remember sitting in AP U.S. History (“ey push,” as my American classmates called it) and learning about Sherman’s pyromaniacal March to the Sea. How he’d spared just one city, the one called Savannah.” This story appeared in May 2022 on Aquifer, The Florida Review online. https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/expats-hk monthly 0.5 2025-02-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/ac70bc66-6d62-44a4-8af6-829a66006770/expats-1240x625.jpg Writing - Expats - On Expats and the Literature of Hong Kong’s “Expat Bubble” “A woman in a luxurious backless gown stands alone in a nighttime commercial street in Hong Kong. The woman, with light hair and pale skin, is unmistakably white. (She’s Nicole Kidman). The street, wet from recent rain and lined with Chinese shop signs, is improbably empty: of Hongkongers, of locals. In this ad for Amazon Prime’s Expats, directed by Lulu Wang, who is absent and who is spotlit casts an uncanny shadow on the Kidman-produced, multi-million dollar Amazon project, centered on Asia and made for Western audiences.” This story appeared in April 2024 in Literary Hub. https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/rooftoppers monthly 0.5 2025-02-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/3966ffca-556f-45cc-a964-83370143c83f/Spidermanhk.jpg Writing - Writing Shanghai's Rooftoppers - Pressure-and-Release: Writing Shanghai’s Rooftoppers “It made headlines around the world: The young man was doing pull-ups at the top of a skyscraper and let go. “Let go” might not be the right word: it implies intention. “Fell,” however, implies total accident. His arms gave out. He’d reached his limit. I don’t know, because I watched the video until that moment neared, and then couldn’t go on. It was snuff, I thought. To witness that moment would be to witness something horrible and real. His name was Wu Yongning. The tower was a 62-floor building in Changsha. He was performing stunts for a live-streaming challenge, reportedly to pay for his wedding and his mother’s medical bills. He was a rooftopper and he wasn’t the first to die.” This story appeared in February 2024 in The Millions. https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/turbulent-adolescence monthly 0.5 2025-02-25 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/a0ad587d-2a4a-4cb7-9a9e-123c4f616693/jed-villejo-bEcC0nyIp2g-unsplash-scaled.jpg Writing - Turbulent Adolescence: A Global Reading List - 7 Novels Across the World About Turbulent Coming of Age “The FamilyMart on the corner of Yingchun Road and Changliu Road, right across from my middle school in Shanghai, was no larger than 25 square feet, but had all the necessities swarms of middle-schoolers needed to self-soothe after marathon test prep: fish balls on skewers bathing in a perpetually bubbling brown broth, mini Taiwanese sausages roasting under a heat lamp, plastic-wrapped onigiri bursting with mayo and pork floss. Though no one dared to test this during peak student hours, I knew the market sold alcohol to minors: my mom had been sending me on beer runs since I was nine or ten, and no clerk batted an eye. My novel, River East, River West, is in part a social portrait of restless and suffocated youth in Shanghai. I’ve long been fascinated by the effect of place on adolescence, how a locale’s social and environmental factors exerts an influence on how young people behave or misbehave, how landscape informs crevices of society young people burrow into or the barriers they break out from. In Shanghai, this meant FamilyMarts and dark KTV rooms where teens could drink and frolic, all-night cybercafés and gargantuan malls, city parks teeming with feral cats, residential housing towers dense as concrete forests where supervising adults were too often absent, busy making money in distant cities. This is a reading list about young people growing up too fast, too hard, too weird, too tenderly because they live in places where the setting is a driving force for complicated youths. Let these books take you around the globe, from working class towns of volcanic northern Tenerife to squatter apartments in Beijing, from a desolate eastern French town corroded by alcohol to the rooftops and cafés of Mexico City, from 1990s Burundi to the tundra of the Canadian arctic. In these stories of fevered hopes and bleak pessimism, absentee parents, epidemics of violence, the anonymity of buzzing metropolises, the wilderness remote towns, the suffocating provincialism, and racial and class tensions are all vivid setting traits to contribute to a kaleidoscopic collection of youth in flux—spanning continents, but all authentic portraits of hyper-particular settings.” This story appeared in January 2024 in Electric Literature. https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/burn-paper monthly 0.5 2025-08-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/46f2320d-5140-4916-aedb-c138d0a6d03b/yolanda-suen-dtnausqrzum-unsplash-scaled-e1704765052902-2048x1154.jpg Writing - The Last Time I Came to Burn Paper - The Last Time I Came to Burn Paper Lu Fang caressed one expensive silk scarf after another at the train station’s Shanghai Tang stall. “Is it for a present?” the salesgirl asked. “What is the lady’s age? I can give you recommendations.” “It’s for my mother,” Lu Fang said. “Old people like flashy colors.” The salesgirl pulled out a bright fuchsia scarf. “This one is five hundred ninety-nine yuan.” “For a scarf?” “These are a hundred ninety-nine, sir, if you prefer.” She led him to another row of scarves and unfolded a square necktie. Her face was neutral. “Less material.” “That’ll do,” he said. But he immediately regretted the decision and wondered if he should have bought the bigger scarf. The salesgirl had already folded the item and was carefully wrapping it in a thin plastic pouch, then tucking it into a red box around which she tied a golden ribbon. “Wait,” he said. “Can you . . . did you take the price tag off?” She hadn’t. She unwrapped everything and tore off the tiny strip at the bottom of the tag. Then, wordlessly, she began the whole process all over.” This story appeared in January 2024 in Guernica. https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/secret-pattern monthly 0.5 2025-05-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/2be119ab-141a-4aaf-8b6f-3b18199b2052/Granta+pattern Writing - The Secret Pattern - The Secret Pattern “When I return to Shanghai, my father is working as a food delivery man. Two years earlier, when he was fifty-nine years old, he’d been hired by an app that allowed its workers to ride bicycles instead of the ubiquitous scooters that zip around Shanghai. Smartphones were only beginning to gain popularity when I’d left the city, and now everyone could tap a button to receive anything, from a single coffee to business lunch-sets to crates of genetically engineered fruit from southern provinces. My father started delivering as a pastime and to make some extra cash. Sometimes he claims it is for exercise. For a few hours each day he rides his bicycle and delivers meals to households in the upper middle-class neighborhood of Century Park, earning between the equivalent of ten to twenty dollars a day. He is visibly much older than the other delivery drivers, usually young men from provinces seeking economic opportunities in Shanghai. The fatality and injury rate for delivery drivers in China has skyrocketed in recent years, mostly because the delivery men race through ruthless traffic to deliver the most orders. They track their earnings and statistics in apps like it’s a videogame, only they suffer real penalties if they do not meet targets. My father was recently reported for working in ‘plain clothes’ and the company docked his earnings, forcing him to order and wear their bright blue helmet and uniform. But if he dons this getup, he does so privately, and changes before he returns, at least while I am visiting. When he comes home he sits down at his desk and watches online videos on 2x speed: Taiwanese talk shows with pro-China slants, true crime vlogs, and 100-episode documentaries on Chinese history. Sometimes several videos are running at the same time, the chipmunk noises of sped-up narration intermingling like the manifestation of a noisy, overstimulated mind.” This story appeared in February 2025 in Granta. https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/rotisserie-chicken monthly 0.5 2025-05-07 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/d37c7e1f-5658-4839-b8e6-45af09874791/Screenshot+2025-05-06+at+9.22.54+PM.png Writing - Rotisserie Chicken - Letter of Recommendation: Rotisserie Chicken “The bird comes in its plastic container, often with a little handle so it can be carried handbag-style. It’s hard to resist its rosemary-scented siren call from the heated supermarket rack. Rotisserie chicken and I go way back: My mother tells me that when I was a baby in a rural Chinese village, my grandmother would dispatch one such meal to us each week via the local bus. To the villagers’ astonishment, I — diaper-clad, 9 months old — consumed each protein delivery with ecstatic abandon. Later on, our favorite pastime in 2000s Shanghai was picking up pirated American DVDs from our street vendor and demolishing a rotisserie chicken in front of a marathon of bootlegged new releases from across the Pacific. Our fingers would rip apart the caramelized skin (that escaping puff of steam!) to tear off a juicy thigh at the joint, shred breasts strip by strip from the spinal cartilage, dig our nails into the neck grooves where dark flesh hid between bones. We worked with mechanical precision: The internal cavity, dismantled, yields secret pockets of meat, and the rib-cage membrane encases the livery richness of offals. By the time we were done, the chicken was a mound of bones.” This story appeared in May 2025 in The New York Times Magazine. https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/at-the-bend-of-the-road monthly 0.5 2021-07-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/1626821613815-OMYF3KZUY8T0NW5VS7MQ/img-3018-scaled-e1626377263289-800x452.jpeg Writing - At the Bend of the Road “The flyers are pasted to dusty window panes in roadside cafés, stapled to skinny utility poles along fields, pinned on the overloaded cork boards of pilgrim hostels. It is July, 2015. Three months ago, along the Camino de Santiago, a Christian pilgrimage trail through Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal that is increasingly popular with secular walkers and international travelers, a woman disappeared. Her name is Denise Thiem. She is a forty-one-year-old Asian American woman from Arizona.” https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/road-to-elitism monthly 0.5 2020-07-02 https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/one-thousand-menus monthly 0.5 2020-07-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/1593699841744-LN7RSTN5DBHE92NGFSDI/Screen-Shot-2018-06-05-at-9.22.59-AM.jpg Writing - One Thousand Menus - She writes of the immensity of blue—the sea, the sky—that surrounds them on the cargo ship as they skirt by the Canary Islands and much of the African coast, occasionally making port calls in Dakar and Abidjan. For the first time, she sees lush tropical fruit piled onto the street stalls—bananas, pineapples, avocados. In Abidjan, my grandfather and she use their last coins to eat a meal of prawns—“veritable gambas,” she writes, “not the small, grey shrimp I ate growing up in La Rochelle.” A gecko crawls by and watches them eat, head raised. Read the full story below, originally published on Entropy Magazine. https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/sicily-in-three-acts monthly 0.5 2020-07-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/1593699418749-HDA9T2YLS9TW3DDBLP5L/siciliy-in-3.png Writing - Sicily in Three Acts - Sometimes you have to fly over the still-freezing Irish seas and you have to spend the night at an airport hotel outside Rome Fiumicino. In Ireland there are many memorials to tragedies — to the Titanic, to the Lusitania, to famine, to people in the police force who lost their lives while on duty. The airport hotel in Rome is a Best Western, with an outdoor pool that wants to be useful, but no one likes to swim in the shadow of planes. Read the full story here in the Jellyfish Review. https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/the-greyhound-years monthly 0.5 2020-07-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/1593700487319-H827ZU4Q1ZX2LQUFVOHO/simone-hutsch-D9wB3hNufsE-unsplash.jpg Writing - The Greyhound Years - It’s 11:23 pm on a Saturday night at the Amtrak station in Savannah, Georgia. There are no more trains for the night. https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/school-in-china monthly 0.5 2022-11-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/1594312877137-MDD5UFW91AN57POSTIHU/1_KDOKv-9hPijaKTI82MaP3g.jpeg Writing - A Mandatorily Communist, Tenderly Ruthless Education - Looking back on a childhood in Chinese public schools Originally published in 2013 in Medium’s Culture Club collection https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/joy-then-came-easily monthly 0.5 2020-07-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/1594316702697-SN14SOVFBD5S4ZYGPXQB/Aro+Ha_0010.jpg Writing - Joy, then, came easily. - 270 kilometers of blisters, bedbugs and beauty on a journey to Santiago Originally published on Medium’s Culture Club collection https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/speaking-up-kavanaugh monthly 0.5 2020-07-09 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5efde1a2c2e9377583525cfe/1594313651585-5CO7Y3O0YCIXGC2JB2YC/0_lFuYWORe7H0tWGCo.jpg Writing - Speaking Up Is What Will Disillusion Abusers Who Hide Behind Privilege - A Yale graduate faces her memories of elite men behaving badly Originally published on Medium’s “Equality” Featured Stories https://www.aubereylescure.com/writing/out monthly 0.5 2025-02-25