Author: Cathy Park Hong
Publisher: Profile Books, 2020
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A fearless work of creative non-fiction about racism in cultural pursuits by award-winning poet Cathy Park Hong
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY 2021
FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NON-FICTION 2021
A New York Times Top Book of 2020
Chosen as a Guardian Book of 2020
A BBC Culture Best Books of 2020
Nominated for Good Reads Books of 2020
One of Time‘s Must-Read Books of 2020
‘Unputdownable … Hong’s razor-sharp, provocative prose will linger long after you put Minor Feelings down’ – AnOther, Books You Should Read This Year
‘A fearless work of creative non-fiction about racism in cultural pursuits by an award-winning poet and essayist’ – Asia House
‘Brilliant, penetrating and unforgettable, Minor Feelings is what was missing on our shelf of classics … To read this book is to become more human’ – Claudia Rankine author of Citizen
‘Hong says the book was ‘a dare to herself’, and she makes good on it: by writing into the heart of her own discomfort, she emerges with a reckoning destined to be a classic’ – Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts
What happens when an immigrant believes the lies they’re told about their own racial identity?
For Cathy Park Hong, they experience the shame and difficulty of “minor feelings”.
The daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up in America steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality. With sly humour and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family 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.
Cathy Park Hong has written three books of poetry, and has received some of the most prestigious fellowships for her writing: the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her essays have been cited by Claudia Rankine, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Ben Lerner, and have been called ‘groundbreaking’ (Granta) and the ‘cornerstone of contemporary criticism’ (Ploughshares).
Source: publisher’s website