NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes "one of the funniest books of the year.... A delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire" (The Washington Post). A deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
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Navigating the intersection of speculative fiction, metafiction, and cultural satire, speculative writing often reveals the surreal absurdity of contemporary systems and media tropes. American author Charles Yu has earned wide acclaim for blending high-concept science fiction frameworks with sharp reflections on identity, Asian American representation, and the mechanics of storytelling. His novel Interior Chinatown captured national attention by using a screenplay format to dissect Hollywood stereotypes, winning the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction.
Born in Los Angeles, California, in 1976 to parents who emigrated from Taiwan, Charles Chowkai Yu pursued a background in science and law before turning fully to creative writing. He graduated from UC Berkeley in 1997 with a degree in molecular and cell biology, followed by a law degree from Columbia Law School in 2001. Yu practiced law for over a decade at firms such as Sullivan & Cromwell and Bryan Cave, and served as corporate counsel for technology and digital media companies. After releasing his debut story collection Third Class Superhero in 2006—which earned him a 5 Under 35 designation from the National Book Foundation in 2007—he published his celebrated debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe in 2010. In 2014, Yu transitioned full-time into Hollywood television writing, joining the staff of HBO's Westworld, for which he received two Writers Guild of America Award nominations. He went on to write for series on AMC, FX, Facebook Watch, and Adult Swim, as well as contributing short fiction to anthologies such as From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back.
Yu's writing style is characterized by self-reflexive humor, formal experimentation, and a poignant exploration of isolation within complex bureaucratic or technological systems. Whether utilizing user manuals, flowcharts, or screenplay layouts, he frequently uses genre conventions—such as time travel and virtual reality—as metaphors for human emotional detachment, family dynamics, and societal marginalization. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in prominent publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Wired, Time, and Ploughshares. In Interior Chinatown, which was shortlisted for Le Prix Médicis étranger and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, Yu transformed the tropes of television police procedurals into a moving critique of Asian American visibility, later creating and executive producing the 2024 television adaptation of the novel.
