📚 Administrative priorities
Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin and Real Americans, is back with a new short story collection, My Dear You, out today from Knopf. Below, she discusses three of the books that influenced her work. The Girl in The Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender: I stumbled across the work of Aimee Bender for the first time about 20 years ago now, and found the trajectory of my writing changed. I count myself among the generation of writers that owe their work to her. I grew up loving fairy tales and fantastical myths; numerous English classes suggested that only realism and Serious Topics were valuable and important. But Aimee’s work suggested otherwise: that magic and pleasure and strangeness could be just as valuable, and could illuminate human emotion just as deeply. Self-Portrait with Ghost by Meng Jin: Meng is my friend, and this book really captures what I admire about her as a writer and a person: it contains a hunger for life itself, and deep curiosity. Some of the stories are magical, others are more …
