Celebrate Katherine Min’s posthumous masterpiece, The Fetishist, completed by her daughter Kayla Min Andrews. Susan Choi will be joining in conversation.
About The Fetishist
In this hilariously savage, poignant novel by acclaimed author Katherine Min, a grieving daughter's revenge on the man who caused her mother's death sets off a series of unexpected reckonings.
On a cold, gloomy night, twenty-three-year-old Kyoko stands in the rain with a knife in her hoodie's pocket. Her target is Daniel, who seduced Kyoko's mother then callously dropped her, leading to her death. But tonight, there will be repercussions. Following the unsuspecting Daniel home, Kyoko manages to get a rash kidnapping plot off the ground . . . and then nothing goes as planned.
The Fetishist is the story of three people--Kyoko, a Japanese American punk-rock singer full of rage and grief; Daniel, a philandering violinist forced to confront the wreckage of his past; and Alma, the love of Daniel's life, a Korean American cello prodigy long adored for her beauty, passion, and talent, but who spends her final days examining if she was ever, truly, loved.
An exuberant, provocative story that confronts race, complicity, visibility, and ideals of femininity, The Fetishist was written before the celebrated author's untimely death in 2019. Startlingly prescient, as wise and powerful as it is utterly delightful, this novel cements Katherine Min's legacy as a writer with a singular voice for our times.
Katherine Min received an NEA grant, a Pushcart Prize, a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award, two New Hampshire State Council on the Arts Fellowships, and a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship, and attended residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Jentel, Ucross, Hambidge, the Millay Colony, and Ledig House. Her acclaimed debut novel, Secondhand World, was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Award in 2007. The Fetishist is her first posthumous publication.
Kayla Min Andrews lives in New Orleans. She has a piece forthcoming from The Massachusetts Review and has been published in Cagibi for fiction, Halfway Down the Stairs for nonfiction, and Asymptote for literary translation. Her work was nominated for a Best of the Net 2020. She was a finalist in the Tennessee Williams and New Orleans Literary Festival's Very Short Fiction Contest in 2023. Kayla assisted Putnam on the posthumous publication of her mother's novel The Fetishist (January 2024), including editing the manuscript. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at Randolph and is working on a novel.
Susan Choi is the author of five novels, including Trust Exercise, which received the 2019 National Book Award for fiction. She has also been recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lamba Literary award, the 2021 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She serves as a trustee of PEN America and teaches in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.