Books like
Yellowface

Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot centers on Jacob Finch Bonner, a writing instructor whose career has flatlined. When one of his MFA students pitches the greatest story Jacob has ever heard, and that student dies before writing it, Jacob takes the idea and turns it into a bestseller. The parallel to Yellowface is immediate: both novels follow writers who build careers on stolen work and then must maintain elaborate lies to protect their reputations.

Zakiya Dalila Harris's The Other Black Girl puts Nella Rogers, the only Black editorial assistant at a major New York publishing house, in an increasingly paranoid situation when a second Black woman named Hazel joins the company. What starts as workplace fiction about microaggressions and tokenism takes a sharp genre turn into something closer to horror, with Nella questioning whether Hazel is an ally or part of something far more sinister.

Kiley Reid's Such a Fun Age opens with Emira Tucker, a young Black woman, being accused of kidnapping while babysitting a white child in a grocery store. Her employer, Alix Chamberlain, a social media influencer who brands herself as progressive, tries to turn the incident into a cause that serves her own image. Reid builds the novel around two women whose lives intersect through class, race, and performance, and the satire targets white savior instincts with surgical accuracy.

Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow follows Sam Masur and Sadie Green from childhood through decades of collaboration in the video game industry. Their partnership produces brilliant work, but success introduces jealousy, resentment, and arguments about who deserves credit for what. The friendship at the center feels real in ways that make its fractures painful, and Zevin is honest about how creative partnerships can survive everything except questions of ownership.

Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows an unnamed narrator, a young, beautiful, wealthy white woman in early-2000s Manhattan who decides to sleep for an entire year with the help of a psychiatrist willing to prescribe anything. The narrator is fully aware of her privilege and uses it as insulation from the world, and Moshfegh writes her with a deadpan voice that makes narcissism sound almost reasonable. The connection to Yellowface runs through both novels' decision to plant readers inside the consciousness of women who know exactly what they are doing and feel no real guilt about it.

Elaine Hsieh Chou's Disorientation drops PhD student Ingrid Yang into a crisis when she discovers that the famous Chinese poet she has built her dissertation around may not be who the academic establishment claims he is. The discovery threatens to upend not just Ingrid's career but the entire department's identity, and Chou uses the situation to skewer academia's fetishization of Asian culture while simultaneously interrogating what Asian American identity means to the people performing it.

Emma Cline's The Guest follows Alex, a young woman spending the summer in the Hamptons with an older man named Simon. When she crosses a line and gets kicked out, she has one week until a Labor Day party where she believes she can fix everything, and she spends those days drifting through wealthy spaces by pretending she belongs. Cline writes Alex with the same controlled, close first-person voice that Kuang uses for June, and both novels study women who survive by performing identities that are not their own.

Hernan Diaz's Trust is the literary novel Yellowface readers reach for next when the question is who gets to write a story and what the writer is willing to hide. The book stacks four manuscripts on top of each other, a 1937 novel about a Wall Street tycoon, the tycoon's own unfinished autobiography, a secretary's late-life memoir of ghostwriting that autobiography, and the wife's private diary, and each new layer cancels the layer beneath it.

Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer is the unreliable-narrator masterclass Yellowface readers should have queued up next. The narrator is a half-French half-Vietnamese communist spy embedded with a South Vietnamese general's family, writing a confession from a re-education camp after the fall of Saigon.

Ling Ma's Severance is the deadpan office satire Yellowface readers will spot on the first page. Candace Chen produces specialty Bibles for a Manhattan publishing house, and she keeps showing up to the office long after a fungal pandemic has emptied New York and turned the infected into ritual-bound husks repeating the routines of their old lives.