Books like
Yellowface

Start with this one if the stolen manuscript was the part of Yellowface you could not stop thinking about. In Jean Hanff Korelitz's The Plot, Jacob Finch Bonner is a writing instructor whose career has flatlined. When one of his MFA students pitches the greatest story Jacob has ever heard and then dies before writing it, Jacob turns it into his own bestseller.

Like June Hayward, he builds a career on stolen work and then has to keep up an elaborate lie to protect it. Korelitz shapes the book as a thriller, with someone anonymously taunting Jacob about what he did, but the real tension is watching him justify the theft to himself. Kuang uses satire on publishing's racial politics.

Korelitz uses suspense to ask a different question: does a great story belong to the person who conceived it, or the one who wrote it down? Jacob is less openly awful than June but no less self-serving, and his excuses sound disturbingly reasonable. If you want to stay inside a literary thief's head, this one is hard to put down.

Read this if you want the view from the other side of Yellowface, from a young Black woman inside the publishing machine. Zakiya Dalila Harris's The Other Black Girl follows Nella Rogers, the only Black editorial assistant at a major New York publishing house. Things grow more and more paranoid when a second Black woman, Hazel, joins the company.

What starts as workplace fiction about microaggressions and tokenism turns sharply toward horror, as Nella wonders whether Hazel is an ally or part of something far more sinister. Like Yellowface, it treats publishing as a microcosm of bigger racial dynamics, and neither book boils them down to easy stories of good and evil. Harris nails corporate culture, especially the way white colleagues perform allyship while holding on to power.

The anonymous notes Nella starts getting run a thread of dread beneath the office politics. The genre shift will divide readers, but that risk-taking with form matches Kuang's own refusal to write a conventional literary novel. It suits readers who want publishing satire laced with real unease about what the industry asks people of color to give up for a seat at the table.

For the same squirm in a different setting, try Kiley Reid's Such a Fun Age. It opens with Emira Tucker, a young Black woman, accused of kidnapping while babysitting a white child in a grocery store. Her employer, Alix Chamberlain, is an influencer who brands herself as progressive and tries to turn the incident into a cause that serves her own image.

Reid builds the novel around two women whose lives meet through class, race, and performance, and her satire of white-savior instincts is surgical. Alix and June Hayward are both white women who use closeness to people of color to advance their own stories. Both books let you watch that self-deception work in real time.

Reid makes Alix sympathetic enough that her worst moments land harder, and the dual timeline shows how long she has performed allyship without substance. The Philadelphia setting grounds the story in specific class tensions, and Emira's refusal to play the role Alix writes for her powers the whole second half. This is sharp social fiction that never lets its characters hide behind good intentions.

This is the warmer pick, for readers who found Yellowface's questions about credit and ownership more gripping than its villain. Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow follows Sam Masur and Sadie Green from childhood through decades of making video games together. Their partnership produces brilliant work, but success brings jealousy, resentment, and fights over who deserves credit for what.

The friendship feels real enough that its cracks hurt, and Zevin is honest that creative partnerships can survive anything except questions of ownership. Like Yellowface, it asks who gets to claim a creative work when two people made it. It also shows how the hunger for recognition can poison even the closest bond.

Zevin writes the gaming world with the same insider knowledge Kuang brings to publishing, and the industry details serve the characters instead of decorating the page. Sam and Sadie are both talented and both flawed, and the novel refuses to take sides in their fights. It looks at what ambition costs with the same honesty as Yellowface, only more generously.

Pick this one if you want a narrator you can neither root for nor look away from. Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation follows an unnamed young woman in early-2000s Manhattan who is beautiful, wealthy, and white. She decides to sleep for an entire year with help from a psychiatrist willing to prescribe anything.

She knows full well how privileged she is and uses it as insulation from the world. Moshfegh's deadpan voice makes her narcissism sound almost reasonable. Like Yellowface, the novel plants you inside the mind of a woman who knows exactly what she is doing and feels no real guilt about it.

June Hayward steals a career, while Moshfegh's narrator opts out of life entirely. Both feel the world owes them more, and both books use dark humor to make that entitlement uncomfortably relatable. Moshfegh's prose is stripped down and acidic, and the pre-9/11 New York setting adds historical weight that the narrator herself refuses to acknowledge.

Disorientation swaps publishing for academia and keeps the question that makes Yellowface sting: who profits from cultural identity, and who gets punished for questioning the deal? In Elaine Hsieh Chou's novel, PhD student Ingrid Yang learns that the famous Chinese poet behind her dissertation may not be who academia says he is. The discovery threatens her career and the whole department's sense of itself.

Chou uses it to skewer academia's fetish for Asian culture while also asking what Asian American identity means to the people performing it. She writes academic politics with a satirist's eye. The professors whose reputations rest on this poet do not want the truth if it costs them funding.

Ingrid is less instantly unlikable than June Hayward, but she is complicit in her own way, and the novel does not spare her. The humor is broader than Kuang's and the plot takes wilder swings. Still, the questions underneath about ownership, representation, and the convenience of the people in charge hit the same targets.

Watching June keep up the act is half the fun of Yellowface, and Emma Cline's The Guest is built on that same tension. Alex is 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.

She spends those days drifting through wealthy spaces by pretending she belongs. Cline keeps the camera as tight on Alex as Kuang keeps it on June, and both books study women who survive by performing identities that are not their own. Alex has no grand scheme; she simply refuses to stop pretending, and each day's lies build on yesterday's.

The Hamptons do for class what publishing does for race in Yellowface: appearances beat reality, and a good act gets rewarded. Cline's prose is spare and tense, and she never fully explains Alex's backstory, so readers fill the gaps from small behavioral clues. It is a character study of what happens when the performance becomes the person, with the same unflinching refusal to moralize that makes Yellowface so effective.

Reach for Hernan Diaz's Trust next if the question that grabbed you was who gets to write a story and what the writer is willing to hide. The book stacks four manuscripts on top of each other. There is a 1937 novel about a Wall Street tycoon, the tycoon's own unfinished autobiography, a secretary's late-life memoir of ghostwriting it, and the wife's private diary.

Each new layer cancels the one beneath it. I went into Trust expecting a quiet finance novel. I finished it convinced Diaz had pulled off the same magic trick Kuang pulled in Yellowface, putting the act of authorship on the operating table.

Both books treat the manuscript as a weapon. Diaz shared the Pulitzer for it in 2023. Read it if you want Yellowface's unreliable-narrator engine scaled up to four narrators and a full century.

If June's voice was the thing you could not shake, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer is the unreliable-narrator masterclass to queue up next. The narrator is a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist spy embedded with a South Vietnamese general's family. He writes his confession from a re-education camp after the fall of Saigon.

The voice runs the show. Every sentence performs for the commandant who demanded the confession, and for the reader, who must decide which loyalty he is faking. Nguyen plays Kuang's trick, using the first-person voice to make you complicit in the narrator's self-justification.

The difference is that Kuang stays inside the publishing industry, and Nguyen stays inside the Cold War. It won the Pulitzer in 2016. Read it for the same race-and-authorship pressure, cooked at a higher heat.

The deadpan office satire in Ling Ma's Severance will feel familiar to Yellowface readers from the first page. Candace Chen produces specialty Bibles for a Manhattan publishing house. She keeps showing up to work long after a fungal pandemic empties New York.

The infected become ritual-bound husks who repeat the routines of their old lives. Ma writes office work with the same flat precision Kuang brings to the machinery of a book launch. The book moves between Candace's empty commute after the collapse and her childhood in Fuzhou, building the same Asian-American interior pressure Yellowface puts on Athena.

Under the apocalypse premise sits one of the sharpest recent novels about labor, immigration, and publishing's quiet dependence on Chinese factories. Pick it if you want a debut with the same cold humor, aimed at the office itself.