The Andrew Carnegie Fiction Award Winner held a book talk this past Thursday.
Photo by Joey Tholl
The soft lights of the Coe Library McMurry Reading Room cast an atmospheric glow across the rows of chairs lined up. After some technical difficulties, novelist Tom Lin took the stage. Lin is a winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. His latest book was published May of 2026.
Following a short introduction to his work, Tom Lin began to read a passage from his latest novel. His prose was strikingly vivid and laced with bouts of humor. In his book talk, Lin touched on heavy subjects like death and the passage of time while still managing to make the audience laugh at his easy humor.
Lin spoke on his award-winning 2021 novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, following Chinese American assassin Ming Tsu as he seeks revenge for his kidnapped wife across the American West. “I was driving around the American West…and I wanted to write a book following the geography” Lin said when asked about his inspiration.
However, the story behind his newest novel, Babylon, South Dakota, has a heartwarming connection to his family’s dog, Argo. After reading an excerpt of the novel involving an immortal dog, Lin broke off, explaining his reasoning for making the dog immortal.
“I have a dog, I think you can always tell when a writer has a dog because they’re such irresistible subjects,” Lin explained. “They seem to understand us enough to love us, and to be loved by us.”
Lin described the beauty of dogs being unbound by the fear of death, before reflecting on the Siberian husky his family had gotten when he was in high school. “She kept us up, and she followed us. She tried to steal our food, and she jumped on us, and she knocked people over. And we loved the hell out of her, and she was fantastic,” Lin explained. “In the end, you know, you get a dog, and you’re like ‘this is our dog’ and it turns out it’s somebody else’s dog, and that somebody was my grandfather.”
One day, when Lin’s grandfather was in hospice during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lin’s mother took the dog out for a walk. Argo started to pull on the leash, and as Argo was a large dog, even at 16 years old, Lin’s mother simply followed where the dog led her. Lin explained how “Argo pulled her down these streets she’d never been, and when my mom finally looked up, they were at the front entrance to my grandpa’s hospice facility.”
“My first book is very cavalier about death, like it’s like a kind of ‘Shoot ‘em up’ revenge western. People die all the time. And I think for the second book I wanted to treat death with the kind of gravity it deserves, and that kind of reverence for life and the magic that we all happen to be alive at the same time. I mean that we get to hang out with each other, and we get to have dogs and see them get old.”
Lin concluded his speech by noting an amazement of the feeling that “the world is out there for us to hang out in. And that’s unbelievable.”
