Two Novels Take on the Post-American Dream
This month, we’re reading two novels by Asian American authors that interrogate the promise and perils of starting over in the United States.
Sarah Wang (Little, Brown and Company, 320 pp., $29, May 2026)
This month, we’re reading two novels by Asian American authors that interrogate the promise and perils of starting over in the United States.
Sarah Wang (Little, Brown and Company, 320 pp., $29, May 2026)
Botox injections are becoming common among American women. If anything can stymie this trend, it might be Sarah Wang’s debut novel, New Skin. The book paints such a cleverly grotesque picture of the U.S. plastic surgery scene that it could serve as a disincentive to anyone considering such procedures.
New Skin begins when 26-year-old Linli Feng returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to care for her mother, Fan-Ju, or Fanny. Fanny, an immigrant from Taiwan, is broke and addicted to plastic surgery. “My mother was equal parts artificial and human,” Linli says. “The differing aesthetic goals of myriad doctors had made her face a battleground of warring ideals.” Fanny’s obsession with fillers and skin bleaching causes her a range of health issues, and Linli must sacrifice her professional ambitions to deal with them.
Things get even worse when FBI agents show up at the Fengs’ door with news: Fanny has been indicted. The U.S. government claims that Fanny is part of an investigation into a sprawling network of “illegal cosmetic injections” involving Asian women in Los Angeles. Fanny was likely injected with “something like construction-grade polymer,” among other substances. Around the same time, Fanny secretly applies—and is accepted—to appear as a contestant on America’s Beauty Extreme, a reality TV show where contestants with botched plastic surgery compete to win a reconstructive procedure.
Fanny’s ordeal is so absurd that New Face necessarily takes on a caustic and humorous tone. A novel that would otherwise be a heart-wrenching mother-daughter saga about the Asian American immigrant experience can do little else when set against the backdrop of the “trashiest show on TV.”
As Fanny scurries around a reality TV house with her fellow contestants—whose failed Brazilian butt lifts and boob jobs Wang spares no words in describing—Linli works to uncover more about her mother’s alleged criminal activity. She also learns something about herself: For the first time, she misses her mom. Linli worked for years to get away from Los Angeles and Fanny. But “[w]hatever private battles my mother and I waged against each other, no outsiders would survive if they attacked either one of us,” Linli decides.
Home alone, Linli begins to empathize with her mother’s life as an impoverished and once-undocumented immigrant, as well as a single mother. Fanny’s fixation on plastic surgery becomes exactly that—a physical manifestation of deeper psychological and systemic battles that she has faced throughout her life. “What if my mother had never left Taiwan?,” Linli asks. “She was forever complaining about how idiotic Americans were, how wasteful and selfish.”
Throughout the novel, Wang references historical influences such as Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, the Feng family’s flight from their ancestral Hubei province to Taiwan, and the Taiwanese factories and California nail salons that Fanny worked at before she got a green card. Fanny, Linli, and their community repeatedly fear raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as well as changes to their Medi-Cal coverage.
By the time Fanny returns from her reality TV stint, Linli has developed a deeper understanding of her mother’s travails, alongside a newfound rage about how the United States managed to capitalize on them. As a “new immigrant,” Linli reflects, Fanny had been guided by a “belief that if she looked good, her life would be good.”—Allison Meakem
Tom Lin (Little, Brown and Company, 336 pp., $30, May 2026)
Tom Lin’s sophomore novel Babylon, South Dakota is so immense in spirit, so imaginatively rendered, that upon finishing it, it’s hard to believe it rings in at fewer than 350 pages. This strange and spellbinding book is at once a fabulist tale of a quiet homestead, a heart-pounding geopolitical thriller, a multigenerational immigrant saga, a dissection of the American dream, and a meditation on longing and death.
In the years after the Cultural Revolution, a Chinese couple arrives in the windswept plains of the U.S. Midwest to start anew on a 160-acre farm. Their single suitcase and knapsack contain but few possessions—perhaps most importantly, a little silk bag of seeds from the chrysanthemums that once grew in the courtyard of the husband’s childhood home, flowers that were “scythed and torched on the night that men—boys, really—had battered down their gates, denounced them as collaborators, and beaten them by firelight.” (Even violence is made beautiful in Lin’s prose.)
Despite the improbability of those fragile tea blossoms thriving in the harsh South Dakotan climate, a handful survive the first frigid winter under the husband’s tender care, and soon, their hybrid varieties blanket the fields, flowering unceasingly and growing like weeds. Early on, the chrysanthemums are synchronized to the lunar calendar, but over the decades, they adopt their own rhythms, even developing immunity to herbicides and years-long drought.
If the chrysanthemums feel a touch Arcadian, the outer world encroaches on this idyll: Soon after the Hsiu family settles in, the U.S. military identifies a patch of their land as its next missile site. Men from the nearby base of “Babylon”—that biblical symbol of human hubris and depravity—arrive to construct and man the silo, which turns out to house not just a warhead but also a device capable of making the U.S. nuclear program infallible. Explanations of this tool, which has been reverse-engineered from Chinese technology, are as labyrinthine as the logic of deterrence itself. Tragedy inevitably unfolds as the personal and geopolitical collide.
Lin, who left China for the United States at the age of 4, captures the impossibility of a private life estranged from the realities of borders and statecraft and empire. This does not mean that Babylon, South Dakota is governed by a kind of fatalism or hopelessness. In the novel’s cosmos, outside forces bring enchantments just as they spell misfortune. By the book’s end, not unlike the Hsius, those improbable chrysanthemums have rooted themselves into the earth, far deeper than anyone envisioned, growing “so low and firm where they had once been cut back that they could simply be left alone.”—Chloe Hadavas
Scottish author Ali Smith’s penchant for homonyms brings us Glyph, a follow-up to Gliff, which we raved about last year. Djamel White makes his debut with All Them Dogs, a literary crime thriller set in Dublin’s underbelly. In John of John, Booker Prize-winning Douglas Stuart brings to life a remote island in the Outer Hebrides. Choi Jin-young’s cult classic about the horrors of consumption, Hunger, is translated from the Korean by Soje. A Dunkin’ franchise, the world of finance, and the Muslim notion of fate converge in Hafeez Lakhani’s Abundance.
A luxury development in Lagos, Nigeria, isn’t quite what it seems in ’Pemi Aguda’s One Leg on Earth. Marlen Haushofer’s 1952 novella The Fifth Year, now translated into English by Shaun Whiteside, offers a window into postwar Austria. Ecuadorian writer Mónica Ojeda’s Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun, translated by Sarah Booker, revels in a raucous retro-futuristic gathering. Tove Ditlevsen’s final novel, Vilhelm’s Room, first published in 1975, is translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. And a Hollywood production about the Troubles goes awry in Seamas O’Reilly’s Prestige Drama.—CH
Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.
This post appeared in the FP Weekend newsletter, a weekly showcase of book reviews, deep dives, and features. Sign up here.
Chloe Hadavas is a senior editor at Foreign Policy. Bluesky: @hadavas.bsky.social X: @Hadavas
Allison Meakem is a senior editor at Foreign Policy. Bluesky: @ameakem.bsky.social X: @allisonmeakem
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