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Sarah Chihaya

Biography

Sarah Chihaya

Sarah Chihaya is a book critic, essayist and editor. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York magazine, The Atlantic and The Yale Review, among other places, and she is the co-author of THE FERRANTE LETTERS: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. She has taught at Princeton University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. She is currently a contributing editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn.

Sarah Chihaya

Books by Sarah Chihaya

by Sarah Chihaya - Literary Criticism, Memoir, Nonfiction

Books can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect “Life Ruiners”. Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison’s THE BLUEST EYE, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah’s deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?