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A scalding, darkly humorous debut following an enmeshed mother-daughter duo, both best friends and enemies, and the plastic surgery addiction that warps their lives into a perilous spiral.
At twenty-six, Linli Feng is still trying to escape her mother Fanny's orbit. But after three years of estrangement, just when Linli has been accepted into a prestigious graduate program, she is dragged back by Fanny's latest medical catastrophe and forced to return home.
For decades, Fanny has been addicted to plastic surgery, getting bargain procedures in the basements of LA's bootleg beauty industry. Now Fanny's disfigured face is in dangerous revolt, infected and collapsing yet again from black-market injectables.
But even as Linli wades through the wreck of family finances and juggles her mother's medical care, Fanny has another secret in store. Fanny has won a spot on America's Beauty Extreme, a reality television competition in which botched plastic surgery addicts compete for reconstructive surgery as riveted audiences tune in. When Linli attempts to rescue Fanny from the sinister subculture that has already claimed her mother's face, she must at last confront the corrosive reality of the American Dream that is at the fraught heart of their relationship.
"Wang debuts with the spectacular and wrenching story of a woman contending with her mother's plastic surgery addiction…This bracing tale goes much more than skin deep." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A troubling take on obsessive self-improvement." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Sarah Wang's New Skin is a marvel. Mirthfully and mercilessly abject, New Skin is a page-turner that feels equal parts cinematic romp and serrated analysis of some of the most important issues of our day: immigration, assimilation, debt, intergenerational suffering, self-immolation, and the possibilities for repair. A truly original debut from a seriously intelligent writer." ―Maggie Nelson, author of Like Love and The Argonauts
"New Skin offers a brilliantly dark account of a mother and her daughter locked in a relationship with each other and the wider world that no amount of surgery can cure. Sarah Wang's novel is intense, engaging, original and hilarious." ―Colm Tóibín, New York Times bestselling author of Long Island
This information about New Skin 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.
Sarah Wang has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Harper's Bazaar, n+1, and BOMB, among other publications. Wang is a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow, a 2023 MacDowell Fellow, a 2020 Center for Fiction Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow, and the winner of a Barbara Deming Award and a Nelson Algren prize for fiction. She teaches writing at Barnard College and lives in New York City.
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