The Souls of Yellow Folk: Essays
One of the most acclaimed essayists of his generation, Wesley Yang writes about race and sex without the jargon, formulas, and polite lies that bore us all. His powerful debut, The Souls of Yellow Folk, does more than collect a decade's worth of cult-reputation essays--it corrals new American herds of pickup artists, school shooters, mandarin zombies, and immigrant strivers, and exposes them to scrutiny, empathy, and polemical force.
In his celebrated and prescient essay "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho," Yang explores the deranged logic of the Virginia Tech shooter. In his National Magazine Award-winning "Paper Tigers," he explores the intersection of Asian values and the American dream, and the inner torment of the child exposed to "tiger mother" parenting. And in his close reading of New York Magazine's popular Sex Diaries, he was among the first critics to take seriously today's Internet-mediated dating lives.
Yang catches these ugly trends early because he has felt at various times implicated in them, and he does not exempt himself from his radical honesty. His essays retain the thrill of discovery, the wary eye of the first explorer, and the rueful admission of the first exposed.
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Wesley Yang has published criticism, essays, and nonfiction features in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, the New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Esquire, Tablet, and n+1. His work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Magazine Writing, Best Creative Nonfiction, and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He lives in Montreal.
Nobody writes sentences (or profiles) like Wesley Yang. He is our Balzac.--Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot
Wesley Yang's unsparing vision always affects me powerfully.--Mark Greif, author of Against Everything
A terrifically honest writer, Wesley Yang articulates feelings others are too afraid to call up, let alone confront. This collection is essential because it adheres to no ideology; Yang panders to no one. Instead, with sharp, and even Naipaulian, prose, he takes us deep into the discomfort zones of racial and political discourse.--Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs
Wesley Yang's pen is sharp, his imagination adventurous and his empathy devastating. His words snap a messy world into focus.--Molly Young, author of D C-T!
With gonzo candor and intellectual capaciousness, Yang's Du Bois-inflected essays probe the identity crises of Asian American men and their 'peculiar burden of nonrecognition.'
As Yang's avid followers already know, his laser scrutiny spares no one--not even Yang himself.
Incisive and provocative...Yang provides piercing, prickly insight into the challenges Asian-Americans face from racial and cultural bias, with literary style.
Yang writes with elegance and a fearless interest in the uncommon and unsayable.
[A] perceptive, personal view of the lives of Asian-Americans.
The cry for individual identity can be no louder than in [this] piercing collection...[F]ierce and refreshing.--Carlos Lozada
