Join the virtual conversation with Rebecca F. Kuang on Tuesday, May 21 as she delves into the grappling issues of diversity, racism, cultural appropriation and the terrifying alienation of social media highlighted in her most recent bestseller, Yellowface.
White lies, dark humor, and deadly consequences await within the pages of Yellowface as author June Hayward, acting on impulse following her friend Athena Liu’s death, steals Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, edits it, and sends it off to her agent as her own. So what if she rebrands herself as Juniper Song- complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo - and publishes the experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese laborers during World War I as her own? Doesn’t this piece of history deserve to be told, whoever the teller?
That’s what June claims, and the New York Times bestseller list seems to agree, but June can’t escape Athena’s shadow, and emerging evidence threatens to bring her (stolen) success down around her. As June races to protect her secret, she discovers exactly how far she will go to keep what she thinks she deserves.
Kuang is an award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy; Babel: An Arcane History; and Yellowface. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge, an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford, and is currently pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Chinese literature, and Asian American literature.
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