In this fiercely original novel, Charles is a time-traveling repairman working in the off-kilter Minor Universe 31. He helps clients return to their biggest mistakes, which they incorrectly believe they can repair. But they can’t-and that’s bad news for Charles, who once accidentally ran into and shot his future self. “. a triumph, as good as anything in Calvino or Stanislaw Lem. I wish I could travel back in time with a copy and fraudulently publish it under my own name.”-Lev Grossman, New York Times best-selling author

2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER

From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes 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 a protagonist even 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 he is always 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. At least that’s what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more.
 
Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes, Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterly novel yet.

“Fresh and beautiful … Interior Chinatown represents yet another stellar destination in the journey of a sui generis author of seemingly limitless skill and ambition.” —The New York Times Book Review

New York Times Notable Book author Charles Yu wrote the best-selling novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe. In his stunning, often humorous collection Sorry Please Thank You, Yu draws on pop culture and science to make incisive observations about society- and offer touching insight into the human condition. In two of Yu’s remarkable stories, he focuses on a big-box-store night-shift employee with girl trouble and a company that outsources grief for profit.