My Dear You - Large Print by Rachel Khong (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the beloved 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 these pages 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. The simple, mellowed memory of a sweet college crush.

These stories go deep beneath the surface, touching on everything from the awkwardness of dating in your thirties to what it means to be an Asian woman in America--in fact, what it means to be American at all, and to be human. Along the way, the characters we meet must stop to consider interventions from the supernatural, the earthly, and the immortal.

Playful, profane, and yet enveloped with profound compassion for this life we're living, these stories take on dating, marriage, childbearing age; intimacy, memory, race, and capitalism; living, dying, and being dead. But at their very core, they are tales of love in all its forms--what it means to be in love when you're not supposed to be, or not to be in love when you wish you were; to fail at dating apps or find yourself in weird-but-wonderful lifelong friendships; to struggle, even, in remembering your husband in heaven.

Ranging from sinister to tender, witty, and without fail expertly paced, these stories will have you laughing out loud one minute and reaching out for your best friend the next.

Review Quotes

"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, author of The Butterfly Lampshade

"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, author of Interior Chinatown

"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, author of Headshot

"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

About the Author

RACHEL KHONG is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction. Real Americans, her second book, was a Read with Jenna book club pick, as well as a selection for Kaia Gerber's Library Science and Roxane Gay's Audacious Book Club. In 2018, Khong founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco's Mission District. She was born in Malaysia and lives in California.