![\"Rebecca](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/ce284e58c83a507e17b33bd970d2d9a7677ca342.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Rebecca Kuang photographed at the Boston Public Library. Credit: Ben Sklar<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was my internet novel. It was really me getting the internet out of my system. I\u2019m actually pretty extreme about digital minimalism,\u201d Kuang, who publishes as R.F. Kuang, says.<\/p>\n
\u201cI knew I was never going to write a book like Yellowface again because that just was not a sustainable way for me to be in the world, so I felt like this freedom to do whatever I wanted with the next book. It will probably appeal to a different set of readers, and that\u2019s exciting to me, like I\u2019m tired of talking about Yellowface.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kuang is in her husband Bennett Eckert-Kuang\u2019s study in their Boston home when we speak over video \u2013 not her natural habitat. Enclosed spaces, she explains, feel stifling; she prefers to work somewhere open, where the air can move and the light can spill in. But today, the fading light cuts across her face, artfully preparing us for the shadows of her new novel.<\/p>\n
![\"Yellowface](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/998bacbd46efaf59d56d2092d3870a2c52647ec2.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Yellowface looks down on delegates at the publisher\u2019s stand during the first day of the London Book Fair in 2023.Credit: In Pictures via Getty Images<\/p>\n
If you haven\u2019t read Yellowface, you\u2019ve almost certainly seen it<\/a> \u2013 the bold, winking yellow cover staring back at you from bookshop tables and BookTok. Inside, Kuang skewers the publishing industry and the chronically online mindset with a scalpel and a smirk: taking on how technology has rewired the way we consume art, perform outrage, and weaponise accountability. It\u2019s been optioned<\/a> for a scripted television series with Karyn Kusama (The Invitation, Yellowjackets, Girlfight) attached to direct.<\/p>\n While Yellowface was strikingly topical and opened the door to a wider readership, Kuang had already been forging her path through the searing landscapes of historical fantasy with The Poppy War trilogy (2018\u20132020) and Babel (2022). Drawing on mid-20th-century Chinese history and begun when she was just 19, The Poppy War was no overnight success \u2013 Kuang admits she initially felt \u201csick to my stomach\u201d every time she thought about sales \u2013 but word of mouth gradually built momentum. Meanwhile, Babel, set in 1830s England, became a BookTok hit. This steady rise meant, Kuang says, the sudden attention from Yellowface never \u201cmessed me up\u201d.<\/p>\n Rebecca Kuang attends the 2023 TIME100 Next in 2023.Credit: Getty Images<\/p>\n As she critiqued publishing\u2019s pigeonholing of authors in Yellowface, Kuang herself refuses to be confined by genre or expectation. Almost as soon as she penned the novel, Kuang admits she was bored with the frenetic, internet-fuelled tone that is omnipresent in today\u2019s literary landscape \u2013 eager instead to explore new territories, both thematically and stylistically, in her work.<\/p>\n \u201cI feel like I\u2019m still very young, and I want room to grow, so to be typecast now would feel stifling and murderous to me,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there is this sort of resistant delight to defying categorisation because when you are pretty overtly racialised or gendered, as so many people are, you do always want to be acting out against expectation.<\/p>\n \u201cThat resentment of expectation is not what drives me. It\u2019s just something I find psychologically interesting about myself. What drives me is wanting to evolve as an artist with every project.\u201d<\/p>\n I think it never got to my head or messed me up because I\u2019m really good at moving on to the next project.<\/p>\n She\u2019s also grown wary of publishing\u2019s other obsession \u2013 youth. In a recent piece for Time<\/a> headlined Olivia Rodrigo and the Impossible Pressure to Stay a Prodigy, Kuang, 29, reflects on the pressure of being \u201cyoung\u201d in the literary world. The scepticism that has met her, the interest in her age rather than work, and the anxiety that the apex of her career might have come and gone.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really stupid, I think, that we are so obsessed with young authors in literature. Literature is one of the one things that you only get better at as you get older,\u201d Kuang says. \u201cI hope I\u2019m not in my prime. I hope that my prime is decades away.\u201d<\/p>\n Kuang might not realise it yet, given her self-imposed social media ban, but her readers are already gearing up for her sixth novel out this month. Roll your eyes at BookTokers if you like, but they\u2019re busily assembling reading lists heavy with Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and Dante as they prepare for the release of Katabasis \u2013 a richly layered, genre-bending dive into the underworld. (The title comes from the Greek word meaning \u201cdescent\u201d).<\/p>\n Rebecca Kuang\u2019s new novel, Katabasis, plays with classic texts about the afterlife.Credit: Ben Sklar<\/p>\n In Katabasis, Cambridge doctoral student Alice Law and her nemesis Peter Murdoch wield pentagram magic to descend into the Eight Courts of Hell, all in a desperate bid to rescue their professor\u2019s soul \u2013 without him, their crucial recommendation letter is lost. The novel deftly plays with the classical stages of the underworld journey \u2013 the descent, the ordeal, and the return (anabasis) \u2013 while tipping its hat to Alice in Wonderland, T.S. Eliot\u2019s The Waste Land, and even drawing from the surreal dreamscapes of Dali.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re counting subgenres, it\u2019s a clever mashup of dark academia and historical fantasy, with an enemies-to-lovers twist. And while this might seem underworlds apart from Yellowface, Kuang is as critical as ever, cutting through the pretension, privilege, and politics of academia. If Babel\u2019s Oxford setting allowed an examination of the institution\u2019s historical role as a facilitator of imperial projects, Katabasis focuses on the interpersonal \u2013 the inflated egos, the skewed priorities and values, and the fraught, often toxic, relationships between students and teachers.<\/p>\n \u201cI think of them as a duology that deals with why I love the academy so much and can\u2019t step away but why I am increasingly uncomfortable with it,\u201d Kuang says, perfectly placed to say so, having roamed some of the world\u2019s most elite academic halls. From her undergraduate years at Georgetown University to graduate degrees at Cambridge and Oxford, she\u2019s now teaching and finishing a PhD in sinology at Yale. Her research spans Chinese-language literature and Asian American writing, focusing on Chinese American and Chinese diaspora authors and their explorations of travel, language, geography, and storytelling. Kuang \u2013 who was born in Guangzhou, China, moved with her parents to Dallas, Texas, when she was four \u2013 grew up in a household that valued literature highly and was always drawn to fantasy.<\/p>\n Rebecca Kuang says she enjoys defying expectations when it comes to genres and styles.Credit: Ben Sklar<\/p>\n She started her PhD the same year as her husband, who\u2019s pursuing philosophy at MIT, started his. They recently celebrated their first anniversary. While some couples spend their evenings arguing over whether a potato is too far gone to cook for dinner, theirs seems to involve lively debates on logic paradoxes and the quirks of rational decision-making, conversations about which inspired Katabasis.<\/p>\n \u201cI just fell in love with the idea of logic paradoxes, especially paradoxes of rational decision-making, which feels very pertinent to how we live our lives,\u201d Kuang says.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are so many paradoxes where you make a series of decisions that seem like you\u2019re better off at every stage, and then suddenly you find yourself in a far worse position than you anticipated, with no way to claw out of it. And that seemed like a lovely way to describe being in a PhD program.\u201d<\/p>\n Rebecca Kuang has been writing novels since she was 19.<\/p>\n Kuang\u2019s academic and creative worlds have never been separate \u2013 they flow into one another. Her novels are set on campuses or in educational institutions, and weave in her scholarly pursuits. Her advisors often remind her to rein in her signature point of view, reminding her she\u2019s writing an essay, not fiction.<\/p>\n \u201cI find it very difficult to keep the creative voice from seeping into my academic work. I\u2019m always having conversations with my advisor about how my academic writing needs to be a little less opinionated and have a little less of that spunk and flair that I like to bring to my fiction prose.\u201d<\/p>\n Having reached new heights after Yellowface, Kuang could now write full-time. When asked why she hasn\u2019t stepped away from academia, the answer is simple: \u201cI like it.\u201d<\/p>\n I feel like I\u2019m still very young, and I want room to grow, so to be typecast now would feel stifling and murderous to me.<\/p>\n \u201cI wish I had a more sophisticated answer than that, but I think I\u2019m in a lucky position where I have multiple career options. I could be a full-time author, I could be a full-time academic, and I just enjoy both too much to give either of them up. I always tell myself, the moment it stops being engaging, I\u2019ll step away,\u201d Kuang says.<\/p>\n \u201cFor all that is frustrating and broken about academia, I\u2019m still committed to this core promise of inquiry and curiosity and sharing it with others, and I do still regularly feel that when I step into a classroom.\u201d<\/p>\n She didn\u2019t feel the weight of expectation after Yellowface \u2013 no sudden compulsion to chase its sharp success or bottle its biting style. Instead, she slipped quietly into her next chapter, boarding a flight to Taipei to plunge straight into research for a new book.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it never got to my head or messed me up because I\u2019m really good at moving on to the next project,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cI never enjoy doing the same thing twice. I get bored really easily and I don\u2019t like feeling like I\u2019m repeating myself. I just like jumping down new rabbit holes and seeing who\u2019s going to follow me there.\u201d<\/p>\n Loading<\/p>\n Her next novel, Taipei Story, is a coming-of-age story about language, family, and grief. She says it takes inspiration from novelists Elif Batuman, Sally Rooney and Patricia Lockwood, and follows a student spending a summer in Taipei studying Chinese while wrestling with questions of identity and belonging. It\u2019s a clear break from fantasy, and she\u2019s relishing the stylistic stretch.<\/p>\n Writing, however, has only grown trickier. Taipei Story has been through several drafts \u2013 each one a meticulous autopsy of every word, comma, and cadence. Kuang is merciless with herself as she works through them. \u201cI hate every single word I put down,\u201d she says. But this isn\u2019t a crisis of confidence. Kuang says her reading has sharpened, her standards have risen, and now her prose has to keep pace.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen my writing feels hardest, the results are often the most rewarding,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s not that I\u2019ve gotten worse as a writer, it\u2019s that I\u2019ve gotten better as a reader, and now I need my writing to catch up.\u201d<\/p>\n If her personal katabasis means crawling through literary darkness searching for the good stuff, then the rest of us might as well switch our phones to silent and go with her. In myth, the hero returns.<\/p>\n Katabasis<\/a> is published via HarperCollins on August 26.<\/p>\n![\"Rebecca](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/31c5a860b8866a5db4f0719574323ccdbe7e3601.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Rebecca](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/31cce7b3250d8078ff05c738cf31697742989aa1.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Rebecca](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/afc772e96943d2e5bbea5e5ba21f76d6e97bc31a.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Rebecca](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/dbdc1dd3524c847c0b58545e40782d59216b5c07.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n