MONGOLIAN HORSE is a collection of stories about Asian American experience, about Maryland, about youth and music. Each story delves into the place where love meets estrangement. These are the narratives each character worries over, and in that anxiety, their person is defined.

Radiant, rhapsodic, and full of yearning, David E. Yee's MONGOLIAN HORSE is a triumph of rich sensory details, propulsive rhythms, and characters who are wise, cunning, self-deprecatory, and tender. There's a palpable pulse-beat within every one of these stories, which, songlike in their movements, chart joy and sorrow in equal measure. An absolute delight.--Matthew Vollmer, author of Permanent Exhibit and This World Is Not Your Home

The restless heart beats with a ferocity in this stunning debut collection from David E. Yee. Burdened with the weight of what might have been, and what might still be, the narrators in MONGOLIAN HORSE persist. In the face of all that threatens to erase them, their voices lift in a chorus that sings to anyone who's lost their way but never stopped believing they can once again find it. These are unforgettable stories of the ways we fail one another despite our best intentions and the spirit it takes to keep believing in redemption.--Lee Martin, Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of The Bright Forever and Yours, Jean

These are fiercely glittering gems of stories. Whether David Yee's protagonists are falling in love or fighting, baking or dying, smoking or kissing, making money or making music or repairing broken things, one cannot take one's eyes off them--they are as fascinating and heartbreaking and singular as the people we love in real life. And Yee writes about them with the precision and microscopic attention of a master watchmaker. These gorgeous, ever-surprising, perfectly made stories are somehow at once full of unplumbable mystery and the sort of stories that make us feel right at home. No one else writes like this. This is a one-of-a-kind book from a poet-magician of a writer.--Michelle Herman, author of Close-Up and Dog

Fiction. Short Stories. Asian & Asian American Studies.