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Rachel Khong

Biography

Rachel Khong

Rachel Khong is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller REAL AMERICANS, which was a "Read with Jenna" Book Club pick, as well as GOODBYE, VITAMIN, winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR; O, The Oprah Magazine; Vogue; and Esquire. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The Guardian, The Paris Review and Tin House. In 2018, she founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission District. She lives in California.

Rachel Khong

Books by Rachel Khong

by Rachel Khong - Fiction, Short Stories

The characters in MY DEAR YOU 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 factory worker decides to befriend a sex doll she is tasked with selling. These stories go deep beneath the surface, touching on the particular awkwardness of dating in your 30s and asking: What does it mean to be an Asian woman in America? Or an American? Or a human? Along the way, the characters stop to consider interventions from the supernatural, the earthly, the robotic and the immortal.

by Rachel Khong - Fiction

REAL AMERICANS begins on the precipice of Y2K in New York City, when 22-year-old Lily Chen, an unpaid intern at a slick media company, meets Matthew. Matthew is everything Lily is not: easygoing and effortlessly attractive, a native East Coaster and, most notably, heir to a vast pharmaceutical empire. Lily couldn't be more different: flat-broke, raised in Tampa, the only child of scientists who fled Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Despite all this, Lily and Matthew fall in love. In 2021, 15-year-old Nick Chen has never felt like he belonged on the isolated Washington island where he lives with his single mother, Lily. He can't shake the sense she's hiding something. When Nick sets out to find his biological father, the journey threatens to raise more questions than it provides answers.

by Rachel Khong - Fiction

Freshly disengaged from her fiancé and feeling that life has not turned out quite the way she planned, 30-year-old Ruth quits her job, leaves town and arrives at her parents’ home to find that situation more complicated than she'd realized. Her father, a prominent history professor, is losing his memory and is only erratically lucid. Ruth’s mother, meanwhile, is lucidly erratic. But as Ruth's father’s condition intensifies, the comedy in her situation takes hold, gently transforming all her grief.