Overview

The probing and irrepressibly poignant debut short story collection from Rachel Khong, author of the New York Times bestselling REAL AMERICANS. 'Incandescent and explosive and compassionate all at once' BRYAN WASHINGTON 'Rachel Khong is one of our best observers of the human condition' RITA BULLWINKEL 'Beautiful, effortless' AIMEE BENDER From the author of the New York Times bestselling REAL AMERICANS comes a playful, richly inquisitive collection exploring the connections and disruptions which define us. Throughout MY DEAR YOU, normal people go through extraordinary transformations. A government injects its people with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. A factory worker develops an unlikely friendship with the artificially intelligent sex doll she is tasked with training. God decides that humanity is a lost cause and gives each person 24 hours to decide in which animal form they will spend the rest of their days. Along the way, characters are confronted with supernatural and otherworldly interventions, as well as the earthly, human concerns that shape our daily lives- capitalism and race, intimacy, memory, and mortality. Playful and tender, dark and witty, each of these stories is infused with a profound sense of compassion. They express a powerful curiosity about the human experience, and the inescapable choices that meet us all- to have or not have children; to pursue connections with others in spite of life's impermanence; how to live - and live well. *** Praise for Rachel Khong 'Mesmerizing' BRIT BENNETT 'Gorgeous, heartfelt, soaring, philosophical and deft' ANDREW SEAN GREER 'Traverses time with verve and feeling' RAVEN LEILANI 'A page turner' HA JIN

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9781529155365

Table of Contents

Reviews

Rachel Khong is one of our best observers of the human condition, and isn't afraid to take us to unreal realms in order to illuminate the very real strangeness about being alive right now, in this specific moment. In these stories, ghosts haunt toilet tanks, girls turn into animals, the dead get to choose new bodies for the afterlife, and sex dolls become friends. These fearlessly funny and smart stories are a joy. -- RITA BULLWINKEL 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 There’s a beautiful effortless feel to these stories that makes them so highly readable (and I’m sure wasn’t effortless at all), and with it, Khong is able to sneak in abundant insights and a genuine depth that reveals itself unexpectedly. A thoroughly enjoyable collection. -- AIMEE BENDER I couldn't stop reading these sly, poignant, very funny stories about intimacy and friendship, work and death, longing and connection. Rachel Khong's writing is so agile and fluid and charming that it can sneak up on you and knock you out. -- CHARLES YU 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 Information

Rachel Khong is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, win-ner of the California Book Award for First Fiction. Real Americans, her second novel, was a New York Times best-seller. 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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