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American Woman
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American Woman

By Susan Choi
2003, 369 pages, hardback.
Book Description from the Front Cover Flap
Comments from Back Cover
About the Author

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Book Description from the Front Cover Flap

Susan Choi's first novel, The Foreign Student, was published to remarkable critical acclaim. The New Yorker called it "an auspicious debut," and the Los Angeles Times touted it as "a novel of extraordinary sensibility and transforming strangeness," naming it one of the ten best books of the year. American Woman, this gifted writer's second book, is a novel of even greater scope and dramatic complexity, about a young Japanese-American radical caught in the militant underground of the mid-1970s.

When twenty-five-year-old Jenny Shimada steps out of the Rhinecliff train station in New York's Hudson Valley, the last person she expects to see is Rob Frazer, a shadowy figure from her previous life. On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, Jenny agrees to take on the job of caring for three younger fugitives whom Frazer has spirited out of California. One of them, the granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San Francisco, has become a national celebrity. Kidnapped by a homegrown revolutionary group, Pauline shocked America when she embraced her captors' ideology, denouncing family and class to enlist in their radical cell.

American Woman unfolds the story of Jenny and her charges-Pauline, Juan, and Yvonne, the remains of the busted revolutionary cadre-as they pursue their destinies from an old farmhouse in upstate New York back to California. Provocative, suspenseful, and often wickedly comic, the novel explores the psychology of the young radicals-outsiders all-as isolation and paranoia inevitably undermine their ideals. American Woman is a tour de force with chilling resonance for readers today.

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Comments from Back Cover

"American Woman is a riveting, deeply affecting portrait of a young radical and her turbulent time. With uncompromising grace and mastery, Susan Choi renders the intimate moments that bring to life a tale of prodigious sweep. It is a beautifully wrought, exceptionally powerful novel."
-Jhumpa Lahiri

"Susan Choi in this second novel proves herself a natural-a writer whose intelligence and historical awareness effortlessly serve a breathtaking narrative ability. I couldn't put American Woman down, and wanted when I finished it to do nothing but read it again."
-Joan Didion

"Few writers since Graham Greene have brought such tender, insightful, poetic, intelligent, darkly comic writing to the political thriller. I have to admit this novel made me frantic with suspense-all I wanted to do was jump in and save its unforgettable protagonist from her excruciating destiny."
-Francisco Goldman

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Background on Susan Choi

Susan Choi was born in Indiana and grew up in Texas. Her first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction and was a finalist for the Discover Great New Writers Award at Barnes & Noble. With David Remnick, she edited an anthology of fiction entitled Wonderful Town: New York Stories from the New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Most recent revision September 29, 2003