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“Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen
In development as a television series starring and adapted by Greta Lee • One of Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, New Statesman, BuzzFeed, Esquire, The New York Public Library, and Book Riot
Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.
Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.
With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.
Praise for Minor Feelings
“Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang. . . .The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt. . . . Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness.”—The New York Times
“Hong uses her own experiences as a jumping off point to examine race and emotion in the United States.”—Newsweek
“Powerful . . . [Hong] brings together memoiristic personal essay and reflection, historical accounts and modern reporting, and other works of art and writing, in order to amplify a multitude of voices and capture Asian America as a collection of contradictions. She does so with sharp wit and radical transparency.”—Salon
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Creators
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Release date
February 25, 2020 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593164754
- File size: 198129 KB
- Duration: 06:52:46
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Cathy Park Hong brings a poet's rigor to her narration of these seven essays about the multiplicity of Asian-American experiences. The daughter of Korean immigrants tells stories from her life as well as from American history, examining the particular spaces Asian Americans inhabit in the national understanding of race. Hong's delivery is precise and deliberate. She speaks every word as if it is absolutely essential, thus inviting listeners into the experiences she describes. The seriousness of her tone adds weight to her analysis. Through the complex lenses of art and language, she lays bare how white supremacy and imperialism warp the American psyche. It is as hard to stop listening to these essays as it is to remain unmoved by them. L.S. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine -
December 9, 2019
In this blistering essay collection, poet Hong (Engine Empire) interrogates America’s racial categories to explore the “under-reported” Asian-American experience. Hong, a child of Korean immigrants, was born in Los Angeles’s Koreatown, but moved from the neighborhood before the 1992 riots upended the area. Her topics include personal experiences, from learning English as a second language and obsessing over her scented Hello Kitty–branded erasers as a child, to mining the repertoire of Richard Pryor as a young woman entering the stand-up scene. She is both angry and wryly funny when examining her struggles with depression, hemifacial spasm disorder, and poetry peers who dismissed her first book as “hack identity politics.” Assessing perceptions of Asian-Americans as “next in line to be white,” as one man tells her, she observes that in fact they have the “highest income disparity out of any racial group” in the country. Her confrontational prose maintains a poet’s lyricism in “The End of White Innocence,” which recalls a childhood “spent looking into the menagerie of white children.” Combining cultural criticism and personal exploration, Hong constructs a trenchant examination of race in America. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit.
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