Charles Yu


Charles Yu 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.
How to Live Safely 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 was also a runner up for the Campbell Memorial Award.

Writing

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.

Short stories

His fiction has been published in a number of magazines and literary journals, including Oxford American, Playboy, Esquire.com, GeekDad on Wired.com and Wired, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Mid-American Review, Mississippi Review, The New Yorker, Eclectica Magazine, The Malahat Review, 5 Trope, Sou'wester, Explosion-Proof and Alaska Quarterly Review, as well as cited for special mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology XXVIII.
Yu also received the 2004 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award from the Mid-American Review for his story, "Third Class Superhero".
Many of these published short stories have been anthologized into two book collections: Third Class Superhero and Sorry Please Thank You: Stories. His short story "Hero Absorbs Major Damage" from Sorry Please Thank You has been with annotated commentary from the Hero's thief, navigator and chef, as a collaborative project between the annotation website Genius and Electric Literature.
Yu's uncollected short fiction has also appeared in The New Yorker, VICE magazine's tech-oriented Motherboard website, Lightspeed Magazine and Wired.
Three of Yu's short stories initially published in Lightspeed Magazine have been anthologized in other books:
Yu has also published two short stories in Wired: "" and "".
He has also published a short story entitled "Bounty" in the Xprize ANA Avatar online anthology.
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.

Novels

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 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.
His forthcoming novel is tentatively entitled The Book of Wishing and will be published by Pantheon Books.

Screenplays and TV writing

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.
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.
That same year he also wrote the episode "The Mysteries" for the AMC series Lodge 49.
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.
He also wrote the episode "Mr. Greer" in the Facebook Watch series Sorry for Your Loss starring Elizabeth Olsen that year, and also served as a producer for nine episodes of that show.
In 2020, Yu worked on the writing staff of the Adult Swim show Dream Corp, LLC.

Other writing

Yu's non-fiction, essays, book reviews, journalism and other writing have also appeared online and in print in The Atlantic, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, Time, The Offing, The New York Times Style Magazine, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Morning News and Polygon.
He is interviewed by and also interviews Lev Grossman in The Believer and comments on the work of Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Jonathan Lethem in installments of the "Influenced by" series published by Jaime Clarke in The Believer as well.
He has also written reviews in The New York Times Book Review of books from Neal Stephenson, Joe Hill, Jasper Fforde and John Wray.

Personal life

Yu graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, majoring and receiving a Bachelor in Arts in Molecular and Cell Biology and a minor in Creative Writing, where he "wrote poetry, not fiction" and also "took several poetry workshops with people like Thom Gunn and Ishmael Reed". He also obtained his Juris Doctor degree from Columbia Law School. Yu worked as an associate at the law firms of Sullivan & Cromwell and Bryan Cave as a corporate attorney, as the Director of Business Affairs at Digital Domain and also as Associate General Counsel at Belkin International before becoming a full-time fiction and TV writer. He lives near Irvine, California with his wife, Michelle Jue, and their two children, Sophia and Dylan. His brother is the actor and TV writer, Kelvin Yu.

Awards and accolades

Essays