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.
