"Two decades after Lee's classic collection, Yellow, he returns to the short form with stories about Asian Americans attempting to find their place, including three linked stories about a Hollywood actor."
–Publishers Weekly, Included in Spring 2022 Announcements (Literary Fiction)
"I'm a huge Don Lee fan. He's smart, wry, funny. There's also his humane view of humans, and the startling fairness with which he provides everyone's point of view. I admire the graceful way his stories unfold, as if their pleats are intrinsic, once we stop to notice desire's contradictions, and life's wrinkles."
–Ann Beattie, author of A Wonderful Stroke of Luck
"Where would we be without the work of Don Lee? He is for so many of us our guiding light, the writer we look toward, emulate, and wish we were. Over the course of four novels and a story collection, he has not so much pushed the envelope but blasted it open and created anew the landscape of the Asian American experience with rigor, joy, hilarity, and the most generous of hearts. The Partition is storytelling at its finest and further proof of Lee's mastery–a stunning portrait of who we are now and where we're going."
–Paul Yoon, author of Snow Hunters
"In the shockingly never-released-in-paperback
Lonesome Lies Before Us, Don Lee wrote the anti-ethnic ethnic novel, where only a plate of food might hint at a character's brownness. So in an about face,
The Partition's stories are packed with hapa haoles, gen 1.5s, and lots of where-are-you-from inquisitions. I loved the story 'Late in the Day' in which a filmmaker's labor of love (itself an anti-ethnic ethnic film) is called out for using a biracial actor and instead takes a mercenary job as director of a short vanity film, only to see it picked up by PBS. Another of my favorites is 'UFOs, ' where a television reporter takes two lovers, a married White guy and an earnest Korean American doctor who can spot her plastic surgery. Just about every story turns messy, and why should it be otherwise? The way these stories span decades and the tone of melancholy punctuated with humor make
The Partition's stories almost Alice Munro-esque. A worthy bookend to Lee's first collection,
Yellow, and here's hoping it will be seen as similarly groundbreaking."
–Daniel Goldin, Boswell Book Company (Milwaukee, WI)
Praise for Don Lee:
for Yellow:
"[A] frontal assault on matters of identity...[Lee] proves himself a worthy practitioner of realistic fiction in the vein of writers like Richard Yates and Andre Dubus. His narratives zip along, encapsulating whole lifetimes of intelligent men and women whose self-awareness is insufficient for the gauntlets they must run...It's a tricky proposition to write about ethnicity and not crowd readers with right thinking. But Lee does it, and in the process proves that wondering about whether you're a real American is as American as a big bowl of kimchi."
–
New York Times Book Review for Country of Origin:
"[An] engrossing first novel...about origins and destinations that succeeds rather effectively in dramatizing all sorts of questions about where we have come from and where we are going...A nicely textured travelogue of Tokyo's underlife, all a swirl of action, a whirl of love and sex and race and politics, local and international."
–
Chicago Tribune for Wrack and Ruin:
"Masterly...Lee has outdone himself here. His prose moves and sparkles. He gives his characters a depth and thoroughness not commonly achieved by practitioners of the comic novel, a label that seems almost a disservice to a book as thoughtful as this one."
–
Washington Post for The Collective:
"A fine prose stylist meditates on idealism and pragmatism in his novel of ambitious, young Asian American artists...Here, he credibly addresses the political and social concerns of a specific demographic, while also rendering a work that will feel relatable to nearly everyone who reads it."
–
Time Out New York for Lonesome Lies Before Us:
"Mr. Lee plucks familiar chords with a sure hand, glancing on themes of grief, jealousy and second chances...But what really stamps this book on the heart is Yadin's vulnerable spiritual journey from loneliness toward something like grace."
–
Wall Street Journal
