Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
This book is brilliant. It shows what you can do when you write with perception, humor and creativity about something you have experienced and understand intimately. No cultural appropriation here. He’s also one of the writers on the HBO series West World, so he understands TV too. The book tells the story of Willis Wu and his Chinese American family. Their story is interwoven inventively with the description of the generic roles that the Wu’s and other residents of their SRO play in a TV series...
Wildly innovative; a perfect marriage of form and function.
Wow, I love this book so much. Most books are lucky to be either clever or deep, but Interior Chinatown is both, and makes it look easy. Charles Yu has so much to say about the formulas that make up pop-culture storytelling, and the ways those formulas intersect with stereotypes. Willis Wu is a bit player on a procedural cop show called Black and White (about a black cop and a white cop), and Willis aspires to rise to better roles, like Ethnic Recurring or even the most prized role, Kung-Fu Guy....
There are aliens walking among us.There are people who look like us, sound like us, walk like us, presumably appreciate the cinematic stylings of America's Sweetheart Jennifer Garner like us...But their brains are nothing like ours.Their brains work entirely differently, synthesizing the same data and experiences us lowly humans have into completely creative and unique worldviews that lead to masterpiece-level works of art. Like, I am hearing that that perpetually present 24/7 crowd in front of
This work is marketed as a novel, laid out as a screenplay, and requires the concentration of poetry.On its surface the work (I hesitate to call it a novel) seems to be a critique of typecasting in the entertainment industry, but in reality that’s just the envelope for a far deeper exploration of identity, because the work demonstrates through this unique format the way its characters, and through extension every one of us, is a prisoner of identities imposed on us by others. When the protagonis...
update: CONGRATS... nominated a National book award!!Generic Asian man, Golden palace, ethnic recurringStriving immigrant, kung Fu dad, The chase seven missing Asian, ChinatownI had no idea what to expect when I started reading this book. It’s oddly realistically relatable which at times felt ( to me), like a slap-in-the-face at my own stupidity! It was funny - but.....I had to ask myself “why I thought it was funny”.It was also dark. But why?It’s also sad.... ha... ....that I ‘do’ understand. I...
The question is: Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like? We’re trapped as guest stars in a small ghetto on a very special episode. Minor characters locked into a story that doesn’t quite know what to do with us. After two centuries here, why are we still not Americans? Why do we keep falling out of the story?On one level, Interior Chinatown is the story of Willis Wu, a background actor on the show Black and White, a hilariously bad rip-off of Law and Order:SHE’S the most acc...
Setting: Interior ChinatownCharacter #1: Generic Asian ManTime: Present Day (sadly)What a clever, clever book this is! Charles Yu’s award-winning 2020 novel is a lean, mean, satire machine, packing a punch (or karate chop, as he’d probably write with a wink) in a mere 288 pages. It’s written in the form of a TV screenplay, which creates a very meta rumination on life imitating art imitating life. The protagonist, Willis Wu, is an extra for a crime procedural called “Black & White” (think “Law &
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu is a 2020 Pantheon Books publication. I had forgotten the premise of this book as I didn’t get around to reading it when it was first published, but for some reason, I thought it was a memoir. When I started reading it, though, I thought I had better go back and study the synopsis, because I was extremely confused. Once I realized the book was satirical and written as though it was a script or screenplay, it started to make a lot more sense. While satire can be
2.5, rounded down.I really hesitate to say anything at all about this, since I am sure there will be people screaming that my disenchantment is strictly due to 'White male privilege', but honestly, this novel will only be revelatory to someone who DIDN'T already realize that there is huge prejudice against Asians in not only Hollywood, but in general in the USA. It is really just one long, apparently autobiographical (and somewhat whiny), screed about lack of opportunities and stereotypical film...
This was definitely a “different” reading experience for me, one that was filled with playful jabs at Hollywood and the stereotypes that are so prevalently applied to Asians in modern society. Written in the form of a TV show script (complete with Courier font and everything!), the story revolves around a protagonist named Willis Wu – who, after playing various minor and often non-speaking roles such as Silent Henchman and Dead Asian Guy, has finally worked his way up to the role of Generic Asia...
I found this to be a very entertaining piece of metafiction about what it is like being Chinese in America. It is the only book I read from the 2020 Pulitzer hopefuls list that was written entirely in the second person, a technique that tries to draw us more into the life of Willis Wu. The backdrop of generic pronouns and the generic cop show provide funny, but witty reflections on anti-chinese racism.I loved this quote: because by the time he gets to "West Virginia, mountain mama," you're going...
