East Goes West is an excellent classic story of immigration. Kang's writing is remarkable. This new Penguin Vitae edition is fantastic with it's additional essays by Alexander Chee and Sunyoung Lee that add insight to the novel. Highly recommended that libraries and schools add this to your collection.

This classic of American literature, Asian American literature, and Korean American literature deserves all the attention afforded this new printing and more. I am a big fan of the Penguin Vitae series, and the packaging plus the paratext by Alexander Chee and Sunyoung Lee make this version on worth acquiring, even if you have an older copy of this same text. The hard copy version would make an excellent classroom copy as well.

Penguin classics brings a tale of immigration and exile to a new era and to readers who are acutely attuned to the complexities thereof. While East Goes West is most often seen as thinly veiled autobiography, Sun-young Lee warns of reducing it to this view in the essay that serves as afterword to this edition. Indeed, Kang is the poet he claims to be and gives the narrative so much more than an assimilation plot line. The myriad characters and interactions in a variety of urban and rural settings provide opportunities for contemplations not just on the America of the 1930s, but of what it means to claim one’s identity and the roles of economy, race, and class in that process. The place of the academic and the artist in such a vibrant setting is a question that appears throughout the work. Although it has not had a place of prominence in American literary studies for sometime, East Goes West is a brilliant piece that may be overdue for the limelight.

Thank you to the Penguin Group and NetGalley for an Advance Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review.

The new edition of East Goes West has been given a much needed make over. This hardcover edition is eye-catching and visually appealing to the reader.