Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown is the latest pick for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour/New York Times book club.
Yu’s National Book Award–winning novel follows a Taiwanese American actor who dreams of landing a starring role in a police procedural show. A reviewer for Kirkus called the book “an acid indictment of Asian stereotypes and a parable for outcasts feeling invisible in this fast-moving world.”
“Written as a teleplay, the novel offers a darkly humorous commentary on racism and representation in the entertainment industry,” writes PBS reporter Courtney Vinopal.
Interior Chinatown is Yu’s fourth book, following Third Class Superhero, How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and Sorry Please Thank You. He’s also a television writer whose credits include Westworld.
In a 2020 interview with Ploughshares, Yu said that he wrote earlier versions of the novel before settling on the teleplay format.
“When I came up with the current first line of the book, that’s really what started the ball rolling down the hill, because I found my entry point,” he said. “I play a little loose with the format at times, but it still holds together as a very strange looking screenplay.”
Previous selections for the Now Read This book club, which launched in 2018, include Ling Ma’s Severance, Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X, and Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy.
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
