Synopses & Reviews
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
From the bestselling author of The Hundred-Year Flood comes an incredibly entertaining and profoundly affecting tour de force about a Korean American man's strange and ordinary attempts to exist.
Matt Kim is always tired. He keeps passing out. His cat is dead. His wife and daughter have left him. He's estranged from his adoptive family. People bump into him on the street as if he isn't there.
He is pretty sure he's disappearing. His girlfriend, Yumi, is less convinced. But then she runs into someone who looks exactly like her, and her doppelgänger turns out to have dated someone who looks exactly like Matt. Except the other Matt was superior in every way. He was clever, successful, generous, and beloved — until one day he suddenly and completely vanished without warning. How can Matt Kim protect his existence when a better version of him wasn't able to? Or is his worse life a reason for his survival?
Set in a troubling time in which a presidential candidate is endorsed by the KKK and white men in red hats stalk Harvard Square, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear is a haunting and frighteningly funny novel about Asian American stereotypes, the desires that make us human, puns, and what happens to the self when you have to become someone else to be seen.
Review
“Both wildly funny and horrific in its observations, the novel is an unsettling examination about identity and one's place in the world….It's a story that asks what lengths one must go to in order to be seen." Salon
Review
"A clever story that doesn't give the reader any straight answers...The novel is original; creative, darkly humorous, with dialogue that discusses personal existence and identity, and the individual's roles and responsibilities in society. " Korean Quarterly
Review
"The use of surrealism to interrogate the erasure of Asian American bodies and the trauma of being disappeared by whiteness is heightened by angled takes on recent history....Salesses's tale on the nature of existence triumphs with literary trickery." Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Matthew Salesses is the author of The Hundred-Year Flood, an Amazon bestseller and Best Book of September; an Adoptive Families best book of 2015; a Millions Most Anticipated of 2015; and a best book of the season at BuzzFeed, Refinery29, and Gawker, among others. He is also the author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying and the nonfiction work Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity. Adopted from Korea at age two, Matthew was named by BuzzFeed in 2015 as one of "32 Essential Asian American Writers."