Having scrutinized more than 100 works by emerging Asian American authors and interviewed several of them, Min Hyoung Song argues that collectively, their works push against existing ways of thinking about race, even as they demonstrate how race can facilitate creativity.

Since the 1990s, a new cohort of Asian American writers has garnered critical and popular attention. Many of its members are the children of Asians who came to the United States after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 lifted long-standing restrictions on immigration. This new generation encompasses writers as diverse as the graphic novelists Adrian Tomine and Gene Luen Yang, the short story writer Nam Le, and the poet Cathy Park Hong. Having scrutinized more than one hundred works by emerging Asian American authors and having interviewed several of these writers, Min Hyoung Song argues that collectively, these works push against existing ways of thinking about race, even as they demonstrate how race can facilitate creativity. Some of the writers eschew their identification as ethnic writers, while others embrace it as a means of tackling the uncertainty that many people feel about the near future. In the literature that they create, a number of the writers that Song discusses take on pressing contemporary matters such as demographic change, environmental catastrophe, and the widespread sense that the United States is in national decline.

"“Applying an impressive battery of data from social studies, Song deftly moves his argument toward a poststructuralist close reading...informed by an awareness that expectations based on the race of the author often creep into the unconscious of both writer and reader...Highly recommended.”" - Choice

"Song's study is timely and valuable. Unfailingly engaging and generous, it places Asian American literature in a broader context and demonstrates how humanities scholars can take up the necessary task of explaining themselves to a broader public audience." - Journal of American Studies

"“[O]ffers a comprehensive assessment of important trends and critical concerns by a leading mind in the field, and charts a course for future inquiry. If we can imagine such a genre, it is a watershed book.”" - Twentieth-Century Literature

"“[T]his book makes a valuable contribution to novel theory and should be of interest to readers intent on understanding how the big, ambitious novels of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century work.” " - Forum for Modern Language Studies

"“While The Children of 1965 leaves much to be admired, indeed, can be considered a tour de force of literary criticism, it is the conclusion that is especially powerful and is the payoff for reading the monograph. Reverting away from the academic third-person voice of the previous pages, the conclusion’s first-person musings challenge literary critics to make ourselves relevant to the field that we have spent years and decades studying.”" - Journal of Asian American Studies

"[Song] lucidly weaves together appropriate invocations of criticism and theory with attentive and fine-grained exegesis of novels, short stories, and graphic novels, along with occasional author interviews he himself conducted." - American Literary History