Press Reviews

• Madeline Miller, author of Circe

  In prose at once sharp and lush, Kwon crafts a gripping tale of a woman wrestling with the past, while boldly making her own future. A haunting and powerful exploration of art, racism, feminism, and desire, this novel will stay with me a long time

• Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal and Memorial

  Exhibit is sensational - a novel that's both intimate and operatic, singular and world-encompassing. Kwon's prose is soulful and piercing, chronicling the many ways we lose and find ourselves, blending love and sex and fables between the infinite folds that encompass desire. Exhibit is entirely captivating, and Kwon is truly masterful; it's a book for the mind and the heart and the body, an actual tour de force

• Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less is Lost

  Exhibit is extraordinary: brisk, jolting, brilliant, beautiful, true. A ghost story, a tale of passion, a captivating portrait of how art is made, it turns myths upside down, assumptions inside out, all in the most exquisite prose in the bookstore. Kwon is one of the finest American writers, and her latest is a must for all readers

• Raven Leilani, author of Luster

  I tore through this. Exhibit explores how obliteration can be a kind of rebirth, how the nuances of that are complicated by the constraints of chosen and socially imposed identities. Kwon writes about art and ardor with urgency

• C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold and Land of Milk and Honey

  A rare jewel of a book, at once forceful and unrepentant, delicate and shimmering. R. O. Kwon carves language into a wondrous, jagged thing, revealing facets of desire usually hidden. To read Exhibit is to feel time slow down

• Jenny Mustard, author of Okay Days

  Reading Exhibit feels like watching ballet: a breathtaking performance of fluidity and flight that appears effortless, weightless, but takes huge power, talent, and skill. The result is kaleidoscopic prose, sizzling with tension and beauty. I adored it.

• Vogue

  The sexiest novel of the year... her examination of kink, desire, shame, lust and the liminal space we enter when we finally stop denying ourselves... makes Exhibit uniquely successful and powerfully sexy

• Literary Review

  Kwon is one of the finest stylists of her generation ... the savage beauty and intensity of the prose gets under your skin, lingering like the bruises Lidija leaves on Jin

• New Yorker

  In this novel of ardor and tested fidelity... The two women, both at loose ends, embark on a secret, sadomasochistic relationship. As Jin finds ecstasy in being dominated, she questions her identity, her cultural background, and her truest desires. Kwon's poetic prose gilds a narrative that tightly weaves together myth, self-exploration and artistic ambition

• Boston Globe

  A lyrical, sensual exploration of the relationship between two Korean American women - Jin, a photographer, and Lidija, a ballet dancer - who meet at a party and soon establish bonds both creative and sexual

• Alta

  R.O. Kwon writes stunningly about the hunger for transcendence, for something larger than oneself, more encompassing than society... Exhibit offers a brave, sometimes elliptical portrait of one woman's liberation from the expectations of others... It is a novel that makes profound and singular and visible private experiences often considered askance in American fiction, when they are considered at all

• Book Riot

  In this sexy novel full of art, queer sex and hopelessly entangled human relationships, Kwon explores characters' desires to the fullest, filling her short novel to the brim with complex motivations and the impulse that drives humanity's need for connection with others

• Los Angeles Review of Books

  Exhibit expands Kwon's set of interests, which includes queerness, racial identity, aesthetic vocation, domestic violence, childbearing, and parental aging. But its primary concern, the pattern that constellates these other interests, remains religion, its inexplicability... Stylistically, we see her precise and unusual metaphorical vehicles, her love of prenominal modifiers. At its best, this style is legitimately surprising, demanding are consideration of its objects

• theSkimm

  A book that's spicy enough for summer but substantial enough for book club? Sold

• San Francisco Chronicle

  Kwon's spare staccato sentences feel like drawing short gasps that refuse to give readers the satisfaction of a full-bodied breath. Because of the uncertainties inherent to desire, Kwon leaves readers wanting, wondering, who and what Jin will ultimately choose for herself, but hoping she keeps meeting the ghost of the kisaeng on the way there

• The Atlantic

  Exhibit takes an expansive view of the things that women are punished for wanting... Whether she is justified in hurtling toward her urges matters less than the spectacle of her craving. Searching and introspective, Exhibit reflects some of the same social issues that Kwon has addressed in her non-fiction... the stigmatization of kink, the complexities of queerness, and the constant, destabilizing threat of violence against Asian women... Jin's misdeeds are fictional, but the societal constraints she faces exist well outside the novel's pages

• Bustle

  In a hypnotic, sensual stream of consciousness... Kwon explores an intimacy that grows into obsession, revealing insights into the nature of power, sexuality and free will

• Electric Literature

  Kwon's prose is unlike any other, sensuous and sumptuous and yet razor-sharp. Here, she captures the quick-developing intimacy between a photographer named Jin and a ballerina, to whom Jin spills a family secret-a confession with unforeseen consequences

• Chicago Review of Books

  Unabashedly bold and filled with desire, a novel openly and proudly bearing its intimacy on every page

• Washington Post

  An athletic literary talent. The idea of a divided self, a way of half-living, defines this book

• TIME

  A hypnotic queer love story full of lust and longing... a haunting romance about desire, obsession and ambition that is sure to get your heart rate up

• New York Times

  Hypnotic and sometimes perplexing, R.O. Kwon's second novel literalizes the twinning of pain and art with a ballerina character who is an actual sadomasochist... A highly sensory experience, awash in petals and colors, smells and flavors... It lingers like a mysterious, multihued bruise