THE LONELIEST AMERICANS

"Kang combines his personal family history with deft reportage in a provocative and sweeping examination of racial identity, belonging and family."

“In his essays and commentaries, Kang, a contributor to the Magazine who also writes a newsletter for The Times' Opinion section, has been interrogating the ideas underpinning Asian American identity for years. His nonfiction debut is a culmination of these efforts, blending memoir, historical writing and reportage as he questions the usefulness of this identity in describing people who live profoundly different realities conditioned by class, language and ethnicity.” —The New York Times, “11 New Works of Nonfiction to Read This Season” “The Loneliest Americans is most successful when it doesn't presume to speak for some imagined Asian American community to fulfill the book's stated purpose ... Kang, perhaps best known for his reportage on unusual mutations of Asian American masculinity for the New York Times and the New Yorker, notes an Asian American fraternity's hazing ritual that ends in tragedy, as well as his interactions with an Asian American incel (involuntary celibate) group. The introduction and chapters where these appear, along with a fascinating chapter on the rise of Flushing, Queens, N.Y., as an immigrant enclave, feel the most fully baked, and will be edifying to both white and nonwhite readers.” —San Francisco Chronicle “His cultural criticism adds a much-needed perspective to the growing body of literature by the children of Korean immigrants in the United States ... Kang's book adeptly blends history, memoir, and current affairs in an attempt to make sense of the individual's place in the current map of the United States.” —Library Journal

"In this searing treatise, Kang, a writer-at-large for the New York Times Magazine, examines what it means to be Asian ‘within the narrative of a country that would rather write you out of it'...This excellent commentary on the Asian American experience radiates with nuance and emotion."

“Jay Caspian Kang's singular voice combines Salingeresque charm with simmering rage, deadpan hilarity, and laser brilliance as he examines the conflicted efforts of upwardly mobile Asian Americans to find their place in the Black-white binary of American racial struggle and politics. Readers from other ‘inconvenient' minorities will definitely relate. Kang leads us to a smarter, more compassionate and consequential place to take a stand.” —Francisco Goldman, author of Monkey Boy “Asian Americans will never be White Americans, but why do some Asian Americans try? What is an Asian American anyway? Jay Kang's The Loneliest Americans is a smart, vulnerable, and incisive exploration of what it means for this brilliant and honest writer—a child of Korean immigrants—to assimilate and aspire while being critical of his membership to his community of origin, political tribe, and to America. The Loneliest Americans is an absorbing and deeply personal treatise of race, class, and so-called identity.” —Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko “Jay Caspian Kang is an unmissable interrogator of contemporary identity politics: sharp, conflicted, allergic to sanctimony, and unsparing most of all when he looks at himself. The Loneliest Americans is a call for a multivalent and radically honest vision of Asian life in America, a clear look at the schism between the affronts faced by upper-middle-class professionals and the reality of the unprotected working class. Kang lays out the seductions of protective self-interest that need to be reckoned with before they can be cast aside—the individualistic narratives of trauma and ambition that must be overcome if Asians in America hope to establish a politics of broad radical solidarity.” —Jia Tolentino, New York Times bestselling author of Trick Mirror “From courtrooms to classrooms, Reddit threads to his own family history, Jay Caspian Kang fearlessly, voraciously probes the foundations of the Asian American experience, not to disavow it, but to conjure bracing new visions of community and solidarity.” —Hua Hsu, author of A Floating Chinaman

“Of the books in this column, it's the one I can't shake, the most unsettling, and certainly least lovable, by design. It's also the hardest to put down.” —Christopher Borrelli,?Chicago Tribune “I found in [Kang's] work someone who takes seriously both the craft of writing and interrogating Asian American identity and politics. Many times I felt his writing to be simultaneously beautiful, funny, and frustrating Reading The Loneliest Americans was no different. Kang's conceptualization of loneliness as a sociological framing of Asian America's position in race politics, both ascribed and chosen, is provocative and ties together what Kang has been hinting at, sometimes loudly, in various places about how Asian Americans practice and narrate our political identities.” —Tamara K. Nopper, The Margins “There's a kinetic quality—a palpable restlessness—to [Kang's] writing that befits the sundry subjects he has covered, including playing golf while muttering ‘bastardized sutras,' surfing to ward off writer's block, and thrilling to the balletic moves of Jeremy Lin on court. You don't read him so much as are conducted along the live wire of his prose. His nonfiction debut, The Loneliest Americans, is an alembic of Asian American identity—both his own and writ large. If the past 18 pandemic months have offered an intravenous drip of hate crimes against Asians, Kang's book titrates those events into a potent mix of memoir, cultural criticism, and deep reporting. The ingredients are volatile, the book, hot to the touch What [Kang] aims for, and achieves, is a complicitous critique. This is Kang as provocateur and The Loneliest Americans, his burn phone. He delivers an incendiary message about Asian Americans that curls in on itself, flames licking at the middle-class vessel in which it arrives ... Ultimately, what he's after is the start of a new dialogue that shakes off hand-me-down homilies. His book is an invitation to think harder and move beyond the existing racial taxonomies that have become distended to the point of futility and that can feel specifically designed to exclude as much as include.” —Rhoda Feng,? Brooklyn Rail

"Much of the book's texture is supplied by the character of Jay Kang, who bristles at the prospect of being a character at all. . . . His perpetual self-doubt makes the book crackle with life. . . . The lasting achievement of The Loneliest Americans is that it prompts Asian Americans to think about identity in a framework other than likeness. It asks us to make meaning in ways beyond looking out for our own."

"The Loneliest Americans dares readers to push beyond their comfort zones and deconstruct the mythology of American identity."