Engine Empire

Reviews / Votes

"An entertaining read, even as it says stark and haunting things about race, love, technology, and the capacities of language to hide or reveal unwelcome truths... While there have always been lots of writers warning us about the corruptibility of language in the wrong hands, few others have made an unbrave new world such a pleasure to discover." -- Craig Morgan Teicher "Reading this book feels like listening to a symphony: Themes develop, vanish and recur amid Hong's abundant verbal music... Hong's triumph is to alienate us from ourselves in order to reaffirm what makes us human." -- Dave Lucas "Part of what makes that worthwhile is Hong's ability to turn her language into more than pastiche, developing styles of writing that feel dense with the historical richness of the English language-a history of borrowing, invention, and manipulation that Hong honors, in part, by making room for her own inventiveness... a sustaining book, one that believes in the value of being moved by words-the value, that is, of being human.." -- Jonathan Farmer "Cathy Park Hong does everything short of inventing her own language in order to show cultures clashing and spilling into each other." "Starred review: Grapples with vocation and origin in a globalizing era... full of luminous surprises." "Will force you to question the possibilities life offers, in the past, the present, and the future." -- Jeff Alessandrelli