My Dear You: Stories

From the 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

“Surreal and mind-bending, My Dear You proves Khong to be just as much a master of the short form as she is with the novel.” —Harper’s Bazaar

“I couldn’t stop reading these sly, poignant, very funny stories about intimacy and friendship, work and death, longing and connection. Rachel Khong’s writing is so agile and fluid and charming that it can sneak up on you and knock you out.” —Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

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 woman adopts a cat who conjures the ghosts of her ex-loves. 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 thirties 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.

Playful, profane, and yet enveloped with profound compassion for life, however you define it, My Dear You takes on dating, marriage, and the pressures of having or not having children; intimacy, memory, race, and capitalism; living, dying, and being dead. At their very core, they are tales of love in its many forms: being in love when you’re not supposed to be, or not being in love but wishing you were; failing at dating apps or finding yourself in weird but wonderful lifelong friendships; struggling in heaven to remember your loved ones.

Ranging from the sinister to the tender, these witty and expertly paced stories will have you laughing out loud one minute and reaching for your best friend the next.