''Last of Her Name'' is a collection of stories by

Mimi Lok Mimi Lok is a British-Chinese author, editor, and educator. She is the recipient of a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, A PEN America Award, and a California Book Award for Fiction. She is also the founder of Voice of Witness, an award-winning human ...

, published by

Kaya Press Kaya Press is an independent non-profit publisher of writers of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. Founded in 1994 by the postmodern Korean writer Soo Kyung Kim, Kaya Press is currently housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnic ...

in October 2019. It won the 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut short story collection and is the finalist for 2020

National Magazine Award The National Magazine Awards, also known as the Ellie Awards, honor print and digital publications that consistently demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative techniques, noteworthy enterprise and imaginative design. Or ...

, The California Independent Bookseller Alliance ‘Golden Poppy’ Book Awards 2020, and

CLMP The Community of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) is an American organization of independent literary publishers and magazines. It was founded in 1967 by Robie Macauley, Reed Whittemore (''The Carleton Miscellany,'' ''The New Republic''); Jule ...

Firecracker Award. The collection explores stories of

diasporic A diaspora ( ) is a population that is scattered across regions which are separate from its geographic place of origin. Historically, the word was used first in reference to the dispersion of Greeks in the Hellenic world, and later Jews after ...

experiences in Asia and beyond, ranging from

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...

, the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

, and

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

. For instance, ''"The Woman in the Closet"'' (novella) tells a story about a homeless elderly woman seeking shelter in unlikely places, and ''"The Wedding Night"'' depicts societal morals surround unconventional relationships. Some of the key themes that the author contemplates are human connection, communication and empathy.

Reception

''Last of Her Name'' received praise from literary critics. Michael Schaub (

NPR National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...

) writes, "Lok's literary debut is among the strongest of the year, thanks to her excellent writing and uncanny ability to create complex characters with the same stubborn flaws as real people"; and according to Alexis Burling ( ''SF Chronicle''), "''Last of Her Name'' is a smorgasbord of powerful writing and angsty emotion wrapped into eight meditations on what it means to feel slightly out of place, either in your head or in your physical surroundings." Judges of 2020 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize cite ''Last of Her Name'':

The stories in Mimi Lok’s ''Last of Her Name'' are more than just deeply felt, richly imagined, and darkly comic; they feel necessary. In these pages, we find fractals. The microscopic contains the macro. The collection ranges all over our globe while distilling breathtaking, tiny moments of tremendous significance. Whether we are with estranged siblings over a meal to try to talk, or moving back and forth in time to unearth one family’s personal history, or in the closet with an elderly homeless woman listening in on a younger man’s affluent life, we are moving constantly between different strata—place, age, class, view of the world. But with this range and movement comes astonishing intimacy and emotional acuity, a determination in each instance to locate that which is most true and most human.

References

{{Reflist 2019 short story collections British short story collections