Minor Feelings
A Reckoning on Race and the Asian Condition
Published on 5. March 2020
Book
Hardback
224 pages
978-1-78816-558-7 (ISBN)
Description
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR AUTOBIOGRAPHY 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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
We are so not ready for what Cathy Park Hong does in Minor Feelings. And thankfully, she does not care whether we are ready or not. ... Her vision and execution are so breathtaking. And so genius. And so absolutely scary. Read it. Reread it. It will read you. -- Kiese Laymon, author * Heavy * Studded with moments [full of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness. * New York Times * Formidable ... [this] book bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision. -- Jia Tolentino * New Yorker * Lands like a sucker punch to the gut ... We learned so much from Minor Feelings, not least what a dazzling writer Cathy Park Hong is. * Independent, Best Essay Collections for International Women's Day * Hong lays bare the shame and confusion she felt in her youth as the daughter of Korean immigrants, and the way those feelings morphed as she grew older .. underscores essential themes of identity and otherness * Time * Minor Feelings is anything but minor. In these provocative and passionate essays, Cathy Park Hong gives us an incendiary account of what it means to be and to feel Asian American today ... Minor Feelings is absolutely necessary. -- Nguyen Thanh Viet, author * Sympathizer * Hong writes masterfully ... [she] names and illuminates issues of race and gender that long went unnamed, creating a blistering new handbook to the state of race in America. -- Adrienne Westenfeld * Esquire * A fierce catalogue of that which has not been named and yet won't be ignored. An electric intervention, a provocation and a renewal. -- Alexander Chee, author * How To Write An Autobiographical Novel * Tremendous. The entire time I read, I was hissing yes and yes and YESSSSS ... It felt like having someone sit me down in a chair and say your feelings are real and this is how we got here and here is a way out all at once. It broke my heart with relief. -- Mira Jacob, author * Good Talk * Hong's essays are wry and unapologetically direct, challenging how we think, how we communicate and what we too quickly assume to understand. Minor Feelings is a sharp and urgent exploration of those hard-to-name sensations that govern racial consciousness. * Refinery 29 * In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong has turned a sharp, yet tender gaze on her own life and contradictions, all while simultaneously probing and tearing apart with relentless exactitude accepted (and often lazy and ill-informed) notions of what it means to be Asian-American in the 21st Century. The book is also surprisingly funny and full of stories and characters, including Hong herself, who kept me turning the pages. It was one of my favorite reads this year. -- Attica Locke author of Heaven My Home and writer for Little Fires Everywhere (Hulu)More details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Trade binding
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 144 mm
Thickness: 26 mm
Weight
395 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78816-558-7 (9781788165587)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
03/2020
Profile Books Ltd
€11.49
Available for download
Person
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).