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The Band
Additional information
| Author | Christine Ma-Kellams |
|---|---|
| Release Date | April 16, 2024 |
| Genre | Literary Fiction |
| Publisher | Atria |
Description
“This could very well be the first great K-Pop literary phenomenon.” —Debutiful, Most Anticipated Books of 2024
Perfect for fans of Mouth to Mouth and Black Buck, this whip-smart, darkly funny, and biting debut follows a psychologist with a savior complex who offers shelter to a recently cancelled K-pop idol on the run.
Sang Duri is the eldest member and “visual” of a Korean boy band at the apex of global superstardom. But when his latest solo single accidentally leads to controversy, he’s abruptly cancelled.
To spare the band from fallout with obsessive fans and overbearing management, Duri disappears from the public eye by hiding out in the McMansion of a Chinese American woman he meets in a Los Angeles H-Mart. But his rescuer is both unhappily married with children and a psychologist with a savior complex, a combination that makes their potential union both seductive and incredibly problematic.
Meanwhile, Duri’s cancellation catapults not only a series of repressed memories from his music producer’s earlier years about the original girl group whose tragic disbanding preceded his current success, but also a spiral of violent interactions that culminates in an award show event with reverberations that forever change the fates of both the band members and the music industry.
In its indicting portrayal of mental health and public obsession, fandom, and cancel culture, The Band considers the many ways in which love and celebrity can devolve into something far more sinister when their demands are unmet.
About the Author
I
n Puerto Rico, the kids at El Colegio Sagrado called me “La Chinita” because my birth name (“Xiao Ma”) was impossible to pronounce. My father, fresh out of China’s Cultural Revolution, moved there thinking that Puerto Rico was the 51st state (it said “U.S. territory” on the atlas!), to acquire a magical string of initials behind his last name—a configuration of the alphabet that he hoped would be powerful enough to make us worthy of being American. Unbeknownst to us, a Ph.D. from the Caribbean was useless in America, especially when accompanied by a Chinese accent. Difference, (studies show) can be threatening, because they violate expectancy.
These days, I have a degree in Spanish and am a psychologist by day to solve precisely this kind of childhood mystery. I received my Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara and completed two postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University before my current position as an associate professor at San Jose State University. My empirical studies on culture, social perception and relationships have also been widely covered in GQ (Australia), Esquire (Middle East), Boston Globe, Vice News, Elle Magazine (UK), the Atlantic, Yahoo News, MSN News, Fox News, New York Post, and Daily Mail. My academic text, Cultural Psychology: Cross- and Multicultural Perspectives, has been adopted in classes at college campuses across the U.S. and overseas.
These badges notwithstanding, I consider my stories my greatest work. Across my two completed novels and short story collection, I break and expand the literary categories we think we know, including newer labels like “immigrant voices” or “writers of color” and age-old ones like “love story.” As a first-generation Chinese-American with a bad habit of moving every handful of years, I’ve been called “a woman without a country,” but that just means I’m most at home when navigating the borders between worlds.
