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Churn: an illustrated novel-in-stories
Winner of the 2022 George Garrett Fiction Prize
2024 Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction Finalist
Longlisted for the Maya Angelou Book Award
After a family trip turned chaotic, siblings Jordan and Chung come up altered: Jordan begins to emit smoke when angered, and Chung locks up in the face of conflict, flops like a fish out of water. From the plains of rural Kansas to hundred-acre towns, the end of the universe to its earliest breath, Churn tells a story of rural Kansas like you’ve never seen before.
Out Now
from Texas Review Press
Read excerpts of Churn:
“Six Days,” Split Lip Magazine
“Burn,” Free State Review
“Clinton Lake,” Cola Literary Review
“Grandma Kim at Forty-Five,” Fractured Literary
Order Churn Now
Interviews, Articles, Reviews
“Churn by Chloe Chun Seim,” Review by E.C. Barrett, Strange Horizons
“Adam Camiolo Reads Chloe Chun Seim’s Illustrated Novel-in-Stories Churn,” Heavy Feather Review
“Kansan Author Chloe Chun Seim Releases Realism and Supernatural Fused Novel Churn,” The Pitch KC
“Chloe Chun Seim Interview,” Speaking of Marvels
“An inventive and deeply felt coming-of-age novel following two siblings.” – Kirkus Reviews
“I can’t remember ever having read a book like this. Every story in Churn will move you, surprise you, keep you on your toes. Chloe Seim is a writer of gargantuan talent, and this wonderful debut is all the proof of that we could ask for.” – Robert Long Foreman, author of Weird Pig, Among Other Things, and I Am Here to Make Friends
“Written in prose by turns stark, playful, and inventive, Churn paints a bittersweet and emotionally gripping portrait of two siblings as they navigate violence, bigotry, inherited trauma, and moments of glittering joy. In both her writing and her illustrations, Seim deftly captures the feeling of a family in descent, and how the smallest discoveries–a talent for art, a glimpse at a better future—can become a foundation for survival. Churn is one of the best books about life in Kansas I’ve ever read. This one will stay with me.” – Becky Mandelbaum, author of The Bright Side Sanctuary for Animals and Bad Kansas
“A dazzling debut from an explosive and versatile writer. Seim’s prose will incinerate you with its memorable characters and fearless tackling of Korean-American identity, coming of age while poor in rural Kansas, and the mythical—borderline supernatural—way some children metabolize the legacy of family and environmental traumas they inherit…and are forced to continually confront it in adulthood. Equal parts protest and fairy tale, Churn is unapologetic and fiercely creative. Authentic and innovative. Not a book you want to miss!” – Tara Stillions Whitehead, author of They More Than Burned, The Year of the Monster, and Blood Histories
“Chloe Seim’s Churn triumphantly reimagines the American west in the Gameboy era. The daughter of an alcoholic, Kansas-born father and a South Korean mother, Jordan believes, “The country had given me every good thing in my life.” And yet, like the homesteaders in Willa Cather’s My Antonia, Jordan and her brother Chung must fight to preserve that goodness amid the harsh realities of plains life and their own tumultuous family history. It’s a searing and original portrait from a bright new voice in American literature.” – Whitney Terrell, author of The Good Lieutenant, The Kings of Kings County, and The Huntsman
“Astro-biologically capacious and hypnotically drawn, Churn is a luminous, dense star that collapses upon itself in order to expand into its ever widening, swelling, coming-of-age, lacunal sphere, its complex, difficult futurehood. Taking within its magnetic, compelling, centrifugal, childhood/adolescent cosmos, the work presents the queerest, the quasi-Asianest, the farmest-agriculture of semi-Korean-shaded familial grief (maternal torture and paternal despair) and inexorable divorce and intransigent abuse and damage and dysfunctionality in the most poly-monochromatic fashion. Poly-narratological in its perspectives, Churn seeks closure and fearlessness through magical visibility and accountability from pre-pandemic compulsions right into the heart of Covid culture. Designed to hold the readers hostage, it is a spell-binding book, rich in art and emotional, lacustrine, interstellar, eccentric, gay materials. An indispensable antidote to hopelessness.”
—Vi Khi Nao, contest judge, author of Funeral
Interested in an interview, event, or anything else? Send a message here.
Chloe Chun Seim 