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A Novel
by Charles Yu
From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.
Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He's merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that's what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more.
Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes, Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterly novel yet.
National Book Awards, 2020
"Conflates history, sociology, and ethnography with the timeless evils of racism, sexism, and elitism in a multigenerational epic that's both rollicking entertainment and scathing commentary... . Ingeniously draws on real-life Hollywood... . [The book's] sobering reality will resonate with savvy readers." - Booklist (starred review)
"Inspired ... An acid indictment of Asian stereotypes and a parable for outcasts feeling invisible in this fast-moving world." - Kirkus Reviews
"Interior Chinatown .... recalls the humorous and heartfelt short stories of George Saunders, the metafictional high jinks of Mark Leyner and films like 'The Truman Show.'" - The New York Times
"[Interior Chinatown] skewers pop-culture stereotypes of Asian Americans and contends, memorably, with assimilation... bold, even groundbreaking, in its form... Interior Chinatown solders together mordant wit and melancholic whimsy to produce a moving exploration of race and assimilation that shouldn't be missed by intellectually adventurous readers." - San Francisco Chronicle
"[Interior Chinatown is] comedic. It's literary. It's weird and experimental ... a kind of a George Saundersesque alternate reality. It's all of those things, but maybe mostly, it's allegory ... The details meticulously crafted, render a universe that feels complete to the touch." - Los Angeles Review of Books
"[A] sharply observed, darkly humorous evocation of the Asian American experience that blurs the line between performative acts and literal small-screen performances." - Entertainment Weekly
"I'm a big fan of Charles Yu's writing because of his wit and inventiveness. These talents are front and center in the brilliant and hilarious Interior Chinatown, which satirizes the racist imagination and brings us deep into the humanity of those who suffer from—and struggle against—dehumanization." - Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer
"Interior Chinatown is wrenching, hilarious, sharp, surreal, and above all, original. This is an extraordinary book by an immensely talented writer." - Emily St. John Mandel, National Book Award finalist and author of The Glass Hotel
"No one writes like Yu: he's at once sincere and funny, his father-son narratives make me tear up, his work is science-fiction-but-not, and he's always formally inventive. His new novel isn't like anything else, either: it's a novel that's also a screenplay…or a screenplay that busts out of its form to be a novel." - The Millions, "Most Anticipated: The Great First-Half 2020 Book Preview"
"Brilliantly unexpected and inventive, Interior Chinatown upended all the things I was sure I knew about the insidious power of stereotypes and left me feeling a little more hopeful for our collective future. Charles Yu's writing is TRANSFORMATIVE." - Jade Chang, author of The Wangs vs. the World
"Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown is a biting commentary on racism and pop culture in America, told in a form so original it will have readers questioning both the characters' reality and their own. But at its heart, it's also a moving family story of a man learning to be a son, brother, father, and partner in a world that treats him as barely human." - Anna North, author of The Life and Death of Sophie Stark
"This book is smart and fun, comedic and sincere, thought provoking and impossible to put down. Yu is one of the most exciting writers telling stories today." - Edan Lepucki, author of Woman No. 17
"This is a hilarious book. You'll laugh at the universe Charles Yu creates, kitty-corner to our own and just so off-kilter - and then, without warning, you'll be pulled under by the riptide and everything will suddenly make beautiful, perfect, heartbreaking, unexplainable sense" - Raphael Bob-Waksberg, creator of BoJack Horseman and author of Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory
"Most books are lucky to be either clever or deep, but Charles Yu's new novel is both, and makes it look easy. Interior Chinatown is essential reading for anyone who's obsessed with pop culture, identity, and all the ways that we're all playing roles, all the time." - Charlie Jane Anders, author of The City in the Middle of the Night
"Interior Chinatown is a fascinating novel, hilarious and melancholy, a clever depiction of Hollywood dreaming itself and a sharp critique of the nature of those dreams. If it's said that one of the reasons we watch films and television is out of a wish to 'see ourselves,' Yu adeptly raises the question of whether what we're shown in response to that wish can ever be what we truly are." - Dexter Palmer, author of Mary Toft
"I devoured this novel. Yu masterfully orchestrates a heartbreaking and hilarious tale of race in America through the lens of the HOLLYWOOD ACTION MOVIE™. It's an examination of how popcorn-flick pop culture shapes our understanding of each other, and tragically, our own self-definition as Americans and as human beings." - Daniel H. Wilson, author of The Clockwork Dynasty
This information about Interior Chinatown was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Charles Yu is the author of four books, including his latest, Interior Chinatown, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, and shortlisted for Le Prix Médicis étranger. He has received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award, been nominated for two Writers Guild of America awards for his work on the HBO series Westworld, and has also written for shows on FX, AMC, Facebook Watch, and Adult Swim. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a number of publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, Time and Ploughshares.
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