Yellowface

Yellowface is Rebecca F. Kuang's 2023 satirical literary novel, her first non-genre book after the Poppy War trilogy and Babel. June Hayward, a struggling white novelist with one quietly forgotten Random House debut, witnesses her friend Athena Liu (a Yale-and-Iowa golden-girl Asian-American novelist) choke to death on a pancake at her own apartment. June, alone with the body, takes the manuscript of Athena's nearly finished novel, a literary-historical work about the Chinese Labour Corps in World War I, edits it, submits it as her own work under a slightly ambiguous pen name (Juniper Song), and watches her career take off.

Kuang's project is to write a sustained first-person novel from inside the head of the kind of writer the contemporary literary-discourse Twitter has spent ten years trying to identify and cancel. June is unreliable in the specific sense that contemporary American culture is most uncomfortable with: she knows what she is doing, she rationalizes it in the specific vocabulary she has been trained in by her MFA program, she believes that the work as Athena left it would have been worse without her edits, and she persists across the entire novel in believing that the racial dimensions of her theft are somehow not what they obviously are. The publishing-industry procedural texture is rendered with the kind of insider specificity (the agent-editor-marketing dynamics, the Goodreads rating wars, the diversity-discourse incentive structure) that lifts the novel above its satirical conceit.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Kuang entry point for readers coming from outside fantasy (Babel is the right fantasy entry), and as one of the canonical contemporary novels about the post-2020 American publishing industry. Compare to Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles, Rebecca F. Kuang's own Babel for the broader Kuang project, and Percival Everett's Erasure. The Helen Laser audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.