Yellowface

About

Background summary — AI-generated; not source-grounded.

Yellowface is a 2023 satirical novel by Rebecca F. Kuang, a sharp departure from her fantasy work. Its narrator, June Hayward, a white writer envious of her more successful Chinese-American friend Athena Liu, steals Athena’s unpublished manuscript after Athena’s sudden death and passes it off as her own — repackaging herself, with her publisher’s encouragement, under a racially ambiguous name. The novel is a first-person study of self-justification, and a mordant tour of the contemporary publishing industry: diversity marketing, social-media pile-ons, authenticity policing, and the economics that decide whose stories get told and sold. Its unreliable narrator makes complicity and cancellation the reader’s problem as much as June’s.

In the wiki

• Rebecca F. Kuang on National Literatures, Book Publishing, and History in Fiction — Yellowface anchors several strands of Kuang’s conversation with Tyler Cowen: the economics of book publishing, why fiction is rarely genuinely co-authored, and the internet’s appetite for cruelty that the novel satirises.

See also

• Rebecca F. Kuang — the author
• Babel — her earlier novel