Interior Chinatown
Book description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • “A shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood” (Vanity Fair) and adeeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.
Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist…
Why read it?
2 authors picked Interior Chinatown as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Interior Chinatown is one of my all-time favorite novels. It has a personal meaning for me—through marriage I have ties to Los Angeles’s Chinatown, and Yu captures that community’s past and present so compellingly.
The book’s main character, Willis Wu, pursues his dream of becoming a Hollywood leading man, navigating the complexities of Chinese American life and the pressures of American racism. Through Willis’s struggles, Yu provides a sharp expose of Hollywood and its stereotypes. By using the format of a script and, at points fusing reality with fantasy, Yu’s narrative becomes intensively gripping and visual.
This book drops you…
Yu’s Interior Chinatown won the National Book Award because it married form and function in the most spectacular way.
Written in part like a screenplay, the novel tells the story of Willis Wu, an actor trying to break out from the role of “Generic Asian Man.” Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you’ve probably heard about the push for better Asian representation in Hollywood. That certainly plays a role in the book, but there is also interrogation and critique here.
A novel written in the form of a screenplay could have easily turned into…
From Rita's list on if you find genre boundaries kind of silly.
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