Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

SKINSHIP

Yoon Choi

Stories

Eight novelles in one book by a new literary voice.

A long-married couple is forced to confront their friend's painful past when a church revival comes to a nearby town...

A woman in an arranged marriage struggles to connect with the son she hid from her husband for years...

A well-meaning sister unwittingly reunites an abuser with his victims...

Through the lives of an indelible array of individuals Yoon Choi explores the Korean-American experience at its interstices: Where first and second generations either clash or find common ground. Where meaning falls in the cracks between languages. Where relationships bend under the weight of tenderness and disappointment. Where displacement turns to heartbreak.

Suffused with a profound understanding of humanity, SKINSHIP is, ultimately, a searing look at the failure of intimacy to show us who the people we love truly are.

YOON CHOI was born in Korea and moved to the U.S. at the age of three. She has an MFA from Johns Hopkins and is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New England Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Narrative, and Best American Short Stories 2018. She lives with her husband and four children in Anaheim, California.

Available products
Book Published 2021-08-01 by Knopf

Comments

Yoon Choi writes with astounding precision and grace. These stories are filled with unflinching moments, so raw yet so true to life. The American experience is encapsulated here and imbued with a rare freshness. I was enthralled not only by the families, parents, and children of Choi's masterful creation but also by the courage and strength I found on the page.

The rare story collection that draws you in so completely that the pages turn themselves... An exceptional debut.

Think Alice Munro. Think Tobias Wolff. Think Lucia Berlin. Yoon Choi is a writer whose talents must be measured on the Richter scale. The eight rich stories in this debut collection SKINSHIP send tremors through our sensibilities, forcing us to reimagine the bonds that secure families, marriages, and generations. The rolling cadence of Choi's proseat turns lovely, wise, and funnyreleases her characters' voices to speak the truth of lives they'd likely never have otherwise been able to share. And what lives they are. SKINSHIP charts the underlying power and deep humanity of those remanded to be bodega owner's wives, arranged brides, hospice workers, and caretakers, all with inner realms that cascade forth under Choi's careful gaze.

A debut story collection that introduces us to a master of the form. SKINSHIP, and the intricate, lovingly rendered characters in it, will stay with me forever. Yoon Choi has a fan for life.

A masterpiece.

To encounter these achingly truthful, beautiful stories of newcomer Americans is like gazing up at the starry vault of a perfect night sky; it's immediately dazzling and impressive, and yet the closer and deeper you look, the more you appreciate the sheer countless brilliance of Yoon Choi's observations of love and devotion and sacrifice.

These are such fine and startlingly insightful stories. Ms. Choi performs the beautiful oldest task of writing: that of giving us people we believe in, and who earn our interest, and she does this without the slightest hint of the facile, or the flashy. Each story feels true. The troubles of these people remind us of our own, even as they also shine in that wonderful otherness which we rightly associate with, say it, literature.

Stories Spanning Countries and Generations. Read more...

Each voice has something meaningful to say in this accomplished collection.

SKINSHIP is the winner of the PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE for debut short story collection! "To an author whose debut collection of short stories represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise for future work." Read more...

Lovely stories, such a good writer, everything so delicately made but robust and unsentimental too...