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Your next favorite book
is waiting.
From the author of New York Times bestseller Real Americans, a brilliant short story collection about love, life, and the anguish of becoming oneself in a time when it's so easy to be someone else.
The characters in My Dear You find themselves facing extraordinary choices in scenarios that range from the everyday to the absurd: The U.S. government injects all citizens with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. God does away with humans in favor of something much better. A woman adopts a cat who conjures the ghosts of her ex-loves. A factory worker decides to liberate a sex doll she is tasked with selling.
These stories go deep beneath the surface, touching on the particular awkwardness of dating in your thirties and asking: What does it mean to be an Asian woman in America? Or an American? Or a human? Along the way, the characters stop to consider interventions from the supernatural, the earthly, the robotic, and the immortal.
Playful, profane, and yet enveloped with profound compassion for life, however you define it, My Dear You takes on dating, marriage, and the pressures of having or not having children; intimacy, memory, race, and capitalism; living, dying, and being dead. At their very core, they are tales of love in its many forms: being in love when you're not supposed to be, or not being in love but wishing you were; failing at dating apps or finding yourself in weird but wonderful lifelong friendships; struggling in heaven to remember your loved ones.
Ranging from the sinister to the tender, these witty and expertly paced stories will have you laughing out loud one minute and reaching for your best friend the next.
"Uses the flexibility of the short-story form to wonderful and whimsical advantage." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"There's much to admire in this assured collection." —Publishers Weekly
"This collection is wonderful. The stories are a little quirky and comic, but also sharp and insightful." —Chicago Review of Books
"The ten stories in the collection are all distinct and delightful, and will surely stick with you past the final page." —Town & Country
"Khong writes tales of love in its many forms: being in love, not being in love, yearning to be in love, in the throes of unexpected yet wonderful lifelong friendships, and the intimate intertwining of love and grief. Read if you're down to be existential." —Electric Lit
"My Dear You is a collection of wise stories whose wisdom sneaks up on you, delivered as it is in the guise of a joke. If this collection is a book of jokes, the jokes are the hysterical kind. You start out laughing, then realize you're crying, without quite understanding what's happened. Rachel Khong: comic, sage. I loved these bonkers stories so much." —Vauhini Vara, author of This is Salvaged: Stories
"My Dear You is a garden of bravura, incandescent and explosive and compassionate all at once. Khong's stories astound and comfort, expanding the form's possibilities, guiding us through the familiar, and the deeply unknowable, in spectacular form. Khong is one of my favorite writers; My Dear You is one of my favorite books." —Bryan Washington, author of Palaver
This information about My Dear You 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.
Photo: © Andria Lo
Rachel Khong is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction. Real Americans, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller. In 2018, Khong founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco's Mission District. With friends, she teaches creative writing as The Dream Side. She lives in Los Angeles.
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