Rachel Khong

Rachel Khong’s debut novel Goodbye, Vitamin is at once a captivating and quirky diaristic account of a daughter’s year caring for her father in the wake of his Alzheimer’s diagnosis, and a moving – and unexpectedly funny – story about loss, forgiveness, devotion, and early adulthood. Winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Vogue, and Esquire, among others, Goodbye, Vitamin announced Khong as an inventive storyteller and a bold new talent in the world of fiction.

Khong’s highly anticipated second novel, Real Americans (2024), is an ambitious and explosive story that reckons with many of the profound questions of our time: What makes us who we are? How inevitable are our futures? And how far would you go to shape your own destiny? In her signature immersive and moving prose, Khong has written a social novel par excellence that tackles race and visibility, family and inheritance, class and striving, and the way a single family can be made and undone across generations.

Khong speaks to library, university, and literary audiences about writing immigrant experiences, and her own approach to literary craft. Her acclaimed novels, filled with pathos and written with the eye of a master storyteller, are tailor-made for book club discussions and offer an entry point to conversations about identity, science, and family.

Previously, Khong served as the managing editor and later the executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine, where she also edited the cookbook All About Eggs. In 2018, Khong founded The Ruby, a work and event space for women and non-binary writers and artists in San Francisco’s Mission district that she led until 2021.Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Cut, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and Tin House.

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