for Fiction, and a Pushcart Prize. She has received other fellowships and awards from Kundiman, Millay Arts, Hedgebrook, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Tin House, Jentel Artist Residency, and the Korea Foundation. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, VIDA, North American Review, Sycamore Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Lee holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles.
Lee's new novel is American Han.
At Electric Lit she tagged seven books in which we see "characters who look to their brothers and sisters with uncertainty, envy, and love, looking for clues as to who and how they should be."
One title on the list:
The Vanishing Half by Brit BennettRead about the other entries on the list.
Identical twins Desiree and Stella Vignes grow up in Mallard, Louisiana in the 1970s, in a Black community where light skin confers status anda modicum of protection from the virulent racism that surrounds the community. At age 16, the Vignes twins run away to New Orleans to chase their dreams. Over a decade later, their lives have completely diverged. Desiree is back in Mallard with her dark-skinned daughter after fleeing an abusive husband. Stella is passing as a white woman in California, where she lives with her businessman husband and their daughter. Stella chose to abandon her sister and give up her history and identity for a chance to claim the privilege that comes with whiteness. Desiree spends much of her life searching for her missing sister, who has vanished into whiteness as much as she has physically vanished from the sisters’ Louisiana home. In the divergent fates of Desiree and Stella, Bennett traces how race and racism shape the possibilities of life in America.
The Vanishing Half is among Charlene Carr's six top books on belonging and identity and Beth Morrey‘s top ten single mothers in fiction.
--Marshal Zeringue
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