Charles Yu

In 2020, Yu released his second novel, Interior Chinatown, which uses the innovative narrative structure of the screenplay format to tell the tale of Willis Wu, the "Generic Asian Man" who is stuck playing "Background Oriental Male" and occasionally "Delivery Guy" in the fictional police procedural Black and White but who longs to be "Kung Fu Guy" on screens worldwide. On January 27, 2020, Yu appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah to discuss the book, as well as the lack of on-screen representation for Asian Americans and the Asian American "model minority myth". Yu further appeared on NPR's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon, January 25, 2020, and on the Los Angeles Review of Books Radio Hour with Medaya Ocher and Kate Wolf on February 3, 2020 to further discuss the novel.

In 2020, Yu worked on the writing staff of the Adult Swim show Dream Corp, LLC.

In 2019, Yu also co-wrote the episode "Chapter 23" for the FX series Legion and served as a co-producer for eight episodes of that series.

Yu has also published two short stories in Wired: "The Future of Work, Placebo" (December 17, 2018) and "Subtext®:It Knows What You're Thinking Stop Thinking" (December 13, 2016, The Fiction Issue).

In 2018, Yu served as an executive story editor for ten episodes of the HBO series Here and Now, with the episode "Dream Logic" being written by him.

As for editing anthologies, Yu served as the Guest Editor for the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017 from The Best American Series and the publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Yu's uncollected short fiction has also appeared in The New Yorker ("Fable" in the May 30, 2016 Issue), VICE magazine's tech-oriented Motherboard website ("Re: re: Microwave in the break room doing weird things to fabric of spacetime"), Lightspeed Magazine and Wired.

In 2016, Yu was a story editor for ten episodes of the first season of the 2016 HBO series Westworld, and co-wrote the episode "Trace Decay". For his work on the show, he received two Writers Guild of America Award Nominations in 2017: Drama Series and New Series.

His first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, was ranked the year's second-best science fiction novel by the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas — and a runner up for the Campbell Memorial Award. The book was also optioned by film director and writer Chris Columbus' production company, 1492 Pictures. The novel was further listed in Time magazine's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2010, the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2010, and was one of Amazon.com's Top 10 SF/F Books for 2010.

In 2007, Yu was selected by the National Book Foundation as one of its "5 Under 35", a program which highlights the work of the next generation of fiction writers by asking five previous National Book Award fiction Winners and Finalists to select one fiction writer under the age of 35 whose work they find particularly promising and exciting. Yu was selected for the honor by Richard Powers.

Many of these published short stories have been anthologized into two book collections: Third Class Superhero (2006, Harvest Books) and Sorry Please Thank You: Stories (2012, Pantheon Books, Random House). His short story "Hero Absorbs Major Damage" from Sorry Please Thank You has been re-mixed/re-presented with annotated commentary from the Hero's thief, navigator and chef (an elf named Fjoork), as a collaborative project between the annotation website Genius (behind Rap Genius) and Electric Literature.

Yu also received the 2004 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award from the Mid-American Review for his story, "Third Class Superhero".

Charles Yu (Chinese name: You Chao-Kai/"游朝凱"; born 1976, in Los Angeles) is a Taiwanese American writer. He is the author of the novels How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and Interior Chinatown and the short-story collections Third Class Superhero and Sorry Please Thank You. In 2007 he was named a "5 under 35" honoree by the National Book Foundation.

Yu's non-fiction, essays, book reviews, journalism and other writing have also appeared online and in print in The Atlantic ("The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction"), Slate (various reviews and articles on video games such as L.A. Noire and Portal 2), The Wall Street Journal ("Novelist Charles Yu on St. George California Reserve Agricole Rum"), Time ("What It's Like to Never Ever See Yourself on TV"), The Offing ("Thirteen Ways of Looking at 45" about the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump), The New York Times Style Magazine ("George R. R. Martin, Fantasy's Reigning King"), McSweeney's Internet Tendency ("What Kind of World Is This?"), The Morning News ("Buffalo Wild Wings Grill & Bar", a review) and Polygon ("What future artificial intelligence will think of our puny human video games").