The Loneliest Americans

“Lacing reporting with polemic, [The Loneliest Americans is] almost the opposite of a racial explainer: It’s restless, cranky, a rare combination of conceptually rigorous and journalistically curious. It’s the kind of book you think with and argue about, and that makes you feel—maybe foolishly—finally, we’re getting somewhere.”—The Washington Post

“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 New Yorker

“The Loneliest Americans dares readers to push beyond their comfort zones and deconstruct the mythology of American identity.”—LitHub

“It’s a messy, frustrating, thoughtful, confusing, illuminating argument—all at once.”—Chicago Tribune

“[The Loneliest Americans] is an invitation to think harder and move beyond the existing racial taxonomies … Kang may not have all the answers to help us ‘solve race,’ but he does something as important: he asks the uncomfortable questions.”—The Brooklyn Rail

“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 in his community of origin, in his political tribe, and in America.”—Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko

“The Loneliest Americans lays out the seductions of protective self-interest—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, author of Trick Mirror

“From courtrooms to classrooms, Reddit threads to Kang’s own family history, The Loneliest Americans 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

“Jay Caspian Kang’s singular voice combines Salingeresque charm with simmering rage, deadpan hilarity, and laser brilliance … 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

“[A] searing treatise … . This excellent commentary on the Asian American experience radiates with nuance and emotion.”—Publishers Weekly

Jay Caspian Kang is a writer-at-large for The New York Times Magazine. His other work has appeared in The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and on This American Life and Vice, where he worked as an Emmy-nominated correspondent. He is the author of the novel The Dead Do Not Improve, which The Boston Globe called “an extremely smart, funny debut, with moments of haunting beauty.”

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