The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2025 Spring Literature Grant to Angie Sijun Lou for her upcoming novel Pure Leisure.

Pure Leisure is a novel about revolutionary failure and China’s rise as a global techno-capital force, the alienations of girlhood contrasted with an alienated labor economy. 

A young Chinese woman moves to Los Angeles for independence and falls for her roommate, Jessica, who breaks down her conception of purity, showing her the impossibility of getting through life without ruin. As Jessica introduces her to anonymous spaces like cyberspace and protests, she sees parallels between her life and her grandmother's during the Cultural Revolution.  Every summer, Nainai threatens to die, but every time she visits her, she seems more lucid than ever. When the call finally comes, she must bury the ashes in her ancestral village in southern China. Hongyan is nothing like how she remembers, a floating world of e-commerce and total automation. 

Angie Sijun Lou is a writer living in New York. Her stories have appeared in ZYZZYVA, BOMB, FENCE, Joyland, and elsewhere. ​She is a Kundiman Fellow and has a Ph.D. in Literature from UC Santa Cruz. She has received residencies and fellowships from Bread Loaf, Tin House, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. 

Please visit Angie’s Website and Instagram for more information.