Five Star Stranger, a debut novel by Writing alumna Kat Tang ’22, will be published by Scribner Books, a subsidiary of Simon & Schuster, in August 2024.
In the universe of Five Star Stranger, people are able to rent “strangers” for various purposes via an app called Rental Stranger. A commentary on the gig economy, the commodification of relationships, and loneliness in a hyper-connected world, the novel follows the titular, otherwise unnamed Stranger, who is a top-rated companion on the app.
Stranger traverses New York City while aiming to maintain a distance from his clients as he pretends to be characters ranging from: an extra funeral attendant, a wingman, a pretend fiancé, and more. When one of Stranger’s longer term gigs—being a father to a young girl—is challenged by a prying outsider, he begins to reflect on his attachment to his pretend-daughter and her mother as well as his past.
"Five-Star Stranger is smart and slick, a lampoon of the late-stage capitalist tech-ification of modern society, at turns realist and speculative, intimate and engrossing,” says Writing alumnus and author of Flux, Jinwoo Chong ’22. “A novel about a for-hire stranger who cycles through a carousel of identities for paying clients with myriad intentions, it asks an important question: who are you—truly, deeply inside—and if nobody cares to know it, does it even matter?"
Writing professor Gary Shteyngart writes, “A hilarious and touching meditation on our atomized age. It's rare for a book so profound to give so much pleasure, page by page."
Five Star Stranger is available for preorder here.
Kat Tang was born in China, relocated to Japan, and raised in California. She is a former lawyer and graduated from Columbia’s MFA writing program where she was an undergraduate teaching fellow. Her work can be read in Pigeon Pages, Electric Literature, The Margins, and elsewhere.
