R. F. Kuang

What’s the harm in a pseudonym? New York Times bestselling sensation Juniper Song is not who she says she is, she didn’t write the book she claims she wrote, and she is most certainly not Asian American—in this chilling and hilariously cutting novel from R. F. Kuang in the vein of White Ivy and The Other Black Girl.

Authors June Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars: same year at Yale, same debut year in publishing. But Athena’s a cross-genre literary darling, and June didn’t even get a paperback release. Nobody wants stories about basic white girls, June thinks.

So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse: she steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers to the British and French war efforts during World War I.

So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song—complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller? That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree.

But June can’t get away from Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring June’s (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

With its totally immersive first-person voice, Yellowface takes on questions of diversity, racism, and cultural appropriation not only in the publishing industry but the persistent erasure of Asian-American voices and history by Western white society. R. F. Kuang’s novel is timely, razor-sharp, and eminently readable.

Yellowface

Nour

Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me. I'd never be able to walk through a bookstore without fingering the spines with longing, wondering at the lengthy editorial process that got these titles on shelves and reminiscing about my own.

smile??

Syrina

Consanguinity doesn’t translate into unique epistemological insight, that their exclusive cultural snobbishness and authenticity testing are only a form of gatekeeping

An act of translation is an act of betrayal 

Lindsay

Have you ever wondered at the mechanics of popularization?

Asians were silently suffering because they did not exist as a voting category to white American politicians.

Bethany Jenkins

“It appears the alt-right cares a lot about due process, but only when the accused has done something like sexual asault or racially motivated plagiarism.”

Who has the right to write about suffering?

Every time I see Tom, I wonder what it would be like to go through life with the easy contentment of a rock.

…which argued essentially that no one in the current wave of Chinese American novelists was producing anything of value, because none of them had lived through things like tha Tianannmen Square massacre or the Cultural Revolution, and the spoiled Bay Area kids who couldn't even speak Mandarin and who thought that Asian identification boiled down to being annoyingly obsessed with bubble tea and BTS were diluting the radical force of the diaspora canon. 

Emiley Jones

But now, I see, author efforts have nothing to do with a book's success. Bestsellers are chosen. Nothing you do matters. You just get to enjoy the perks along the way.

Yellowface quotes

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