experimental novel, in the manner of kathy acker meets maxine hong kingston, published by CIVIL COPING MECHANISMS PRESS, 2019. shortlisted for the FC2 Innovative Fiction Competition from the University of Alabama Press, 2018.

SUMMARY

S has disappeared. all that’s left of her is a box of discarded text, until she is rediscovered by a former friend, SYT. in this eviscerating portrait (of a portrait), SYT sets out to build a stage upon which S might begin her final performance. “what she needed in these last words was not me but a certainty of form, whose illusion of freedom could animate the rich effects she had buried,” SYT writes. imagined narrative meets archival resurrection as SYT sifts through S’s remains to preserve the last words of a girl as daring as she was obscure. S’s diary entries and (un)published works marry SYT’s retro-speculative observations, until author and alleged editor merge in infelicitous union, bringing to doubt the possibilities of truth, confession, and melancholic recuperation.

PRAISE

Where in the American literary landscape has there been a place for a text like Suiyi Tang’s American Symphony: Other White Lies? Here is the work of an Asian American female millennial—fiercely intellectual; embodied; by turns, exuberant and melancholic, artistic and theoretical, personal and political—that deserves to be read and heard amid and beyond the usual cacophony of praise for young white writerly yearnings.

In a voice that is wry, shattered, and undeniable, American Symphony takes a torch to the myths of the “model minority,” the available female “Oriental” sex object, and the technically-brilliant-but-not creative “Asian” while also ripping through the raced and gendered lies undergirding our ideas of nation and aesthetics. A brilliant debut.

– Dorothy Wang, author of Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry

Suiyi Tang’s AMERICAN SYMPHONY: OTHER WHITE LIES is a polyphonic work that shatters genre boundaries and subverts our ideas of the singular “self” or the singular voice. It contains multitudes, each dynamic sentence twisting blade-deep. It’s truly symphonic: at once lyrical and essayistic, humorous and visceral, this novel will rearrange your insides. It’s unrelenting and immersive and peppered with breathless moments of language (“she was much too buoyant to be buried.”) I was lost and found in the span of these pages.

– K-Ming Chang, author of Past Lives, Future Bodies 

American Symphony: Other White Lies is an existential travelogue that reminds me just how much the hyper-conscious 21st-century self sometimes longs for abandonment; if only we could unshackle ourselves from the conditions of our era, our origins, even our memories. Tang’s prose is at once futuristic yet nostalgic, deeply interior yet fantastical, and freely associative in search of its own set of truths. The worlds Tang has built linger, and their insistent weight is sure to incite revelations big and small.

– Grace Shuyi Liew, author of Careen

Buy (also available from b&n; indiebound, most websites where books are sold)

PRESS
author statement
interview with Di Jayawickrema at The Offing

EXCERPTS
The Offing
Cardiff Review
Vol. 1 Brooklyn

TALKS
Williams College (10/20/19)
Wesleyan University (12/2/19)

cover by DAWN WU