From the author of\u00a0New York Times\u00a0bestseller\u00a0Real Americans, a brilliant short story collection about love, life, and the anguish of becoming oneself in a time when it\u2019s so easy to be someone else<\/p>\n
The characters in\u00a0My Dear You\u00a0find themselves facing extraordinary choices in scenarios that range from the everyday to the absurd: The U.S. government injects all citizens with a drug that makes them see everyone else as members of their own race and gender. God does away with humans in favor of something much better. A woman adopts a cat who conjures the ghosts of her ex-loves.\u00a0A factory worker decides to befriend a sex doll she is tasked with selling.<\/p>\n
These stories go deep beneath the surface, touching on the particular awkwardness of dating in your thirties and asking: What does it mean to be an Asian woman in America? Or an American? Or a human? Along the way, the characters stop to consider interventions from the supernatural, the earthly, the robotic, and the immortal.<\/p>\n
Playful, profane, and yet enveloped with profound compassion for life, however you define it,\u00a0My Dear You\u00a0takes on dating, marriage, and the pressures of having or not having children; intimacy, memory, race, and capitalism; living, dying, and being dead. At their very core, they are tales of love in its many forms: being in love when you\u2019re not supposed to be, or not being in love but wishing you were; failing at dating apps or finding yourself in weird but wonderful lifelong friendships; struggling in heaven to remember your loved ones.<\/p>\n
Ranging from the sinister to the tender, these witty and expertly paced stories will have you laughing out loud one minute and reaching for your best friend the next.<\/p>\n
Rachel Khong\u00a0is the author of\u00a0Goodbye, Vitamin,\u00a0winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction.\u00a0Real Americans,\u00a0her second novel, was a\u00a0New York Times\u00a0bestseller. In 2018, Khong founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary writers and artists in San Francisco\u2019s Mission District. With friends, she teaches creative writing as The Dream Side. She lives in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
Hrishikesh Hirway is a musician, composer, and podcast creator. He is the host of\u00a0Song Exploder, an award-winning podcast where musicians break down the creative process behind their songs.\u00a0Vulture\u00a0called it \u201cprobably the best use of the podcast format ever.” It was also adapted into a TV series for Netflix. He co-created and co-hosted the award-winning podcast\u00a0Home Cooking, with chef Samin Nosrat; and the first celebrity TV recap podcast,\u00a0The West Wing Weekly, with actor Joshua Malina. He composed the original score to the 2025 film\u00a0Companion,\u00a0and the 2018 Netflix show\u00a0Everything Sucks!\u00a0His new album of songs, In\u00a0the Last Hour of Light, comes out April 24, 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"From the author of\u00a0New York Times\u00a0bestseller\u00a0Real Americans, a brilliant short story collection about love, life, and the anguish…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64531,48,52,51,47,50,49],"class_list":["post-278236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-bookstore-events","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}