I write out of pure joy for myself, and for my readers. But I don’t write my books just to watch them be nominated for awards. Satire and comedy, I think, are always given short shrift in the literary world. There have been so many before me, writers like Dominick Dunne, Tom Wolfe and Edith Wharton, who was the original WASP satirizing WASPs.ĭoes satire or comedy get taken seriously in the world of literary fiction? I am also not the first one to write satire about this class. It isn’t meant to offend anybody because I don’t tear people down and I haven’t done a hatchet job of it. In Sex And Vanity, I am looking at old money in New York and at new money in New York. I am just looking at the quirks of a community, like I did with Crazy Rich Asians. Some of my dearest friends are part of this world. I have done my satire of the East Coast WASP elitism with so much love because I feel like I was welcomed into that world. Does this offend people you know since you come from a family of generational wealth too? You cock a snook at the snobbery of the patrician classes and at the same time satirize the desperate pretensions of the new rich. It is straight from the heart and more me. I had a whole other life before this book that I was very proud of (Kwan owned a successful design studio in Manhattan). In some ways, though, it’s terrifying because I don’t want Crazy Rich Asians to be my enduring legacy, because I feel I am so much more than just one book.

Did you worry that whatever you wrote next would be compared with ‘Crazy Rich Asians’?įor me, writing started as a hobby and for it to have become what it has, I am so grateful. 'Sex And Vanity' is already on the New York Times best-seller list and its adaptation rights have been picked up by a big studio. Kwan speaks to writer Shunali Khullar Shroff about the book and his life during the pandemic. Conflicted between her WASP identity and her two antipodal loves, she stumbles and falters till she comes to term with her identity. Forster’s A Room With A View, the novel tells the story of the internalized racism of Lucie Tang Churchill, a half-American, half-Chinese girl born into a wealthy, snobbish family from New York. Featured in TheHollywood Reporter’s “most powerful authors' list and Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2018, he is back with a new novel, Sex And Vanity, which, he says, is the first in a trilogy. He shot to fame with the best-selling Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, which was translated into 40 languages and adapted into a blockbuster film.

Kevin kwan new book 2022