Welcome Me to the Kingdom, a debut story collection by alumnus Mai Nardone ’13, is out now from Random House.
In his collection, Nardone follows three families as they collide and interweave over the course of several tumultuous decades in Bangkok. Told through multiple voices and spanning from the absurd to the tenderhearted, the collection portrays a city devastated by financial crisis, as well as the people who flock there, still seeking the promise of hope it represents.
In an interview with the Brooklyn Review, Nardone addressed his choice of identifying as a 'Thai and American writer.' “For me, the hyphenated ‘Thai-American’ seems to belong to Asian America,” he said. “So it was about making that distinction of being a mixed race person who grew up in Thailand, rather than America. I didn’t necessarily grow up in a minority position as I would have if I’d grown up in the US, and I come to the world from a different perspective because of that. A lot of my book is also trying to mediate and cover the ground between what it is to be Thai and American, especially as it pertains to one of the family storylines.”
The New York Times, which selected Welcome Me to the Kingdom as an Editors’ Choice, said of the book, “This dark collection is an honest, crystalline depiction of what urbanization has done to complicate and erode human life.”
A launch event for the book, featuring Nardone in conversation with author C Pam Zhang, is scheduled for Wednesday, February 15, at Yu and Me Books in New York City. Welcome Me to the Kingdom is available for purchase here.
Mai Nardone is a Thai and American writer whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He lives in Bangkok.
