Interior Chinatown

This National Book Award winner, a novel in screenplay format by Taiwanese American author Charles Yu (Sorry Please Thank You), is a caustic, absurd and endearing exploration of Asian American stereotypes, police procedurals and the immigrant experience. It will also be adapted to the small screen if Hulu has anything to say about it. Interior Chinatown pulls readers into the spotlight by narrating Willis Wu's inner life in second person, asking the audience to imagine a life as "part of the American show, black and white, except they have no part for yellow." These prose passages are interspersed with scene notations and dialogue structured as though taken from the script of Black and White.

In Interior Chinatown's playful mixture of formats, including montages and a children's show, lines blur between Willis's thoughts and the show's dialogue. Readers will often find themselves unable to tell reality from television, which is Yu's point in a nutshell. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads

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