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My Dear You

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.

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

About Rachel Khong

Rachel Khong is the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, win­ner of the California Book Award for First Fiction. Real Americans, her second novel, was a New York Times best­seller. 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.
Details
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • ISBN: 9781804957165
  • Length: 272 pages
  • Price: £7.99
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