Unfortunately I was unable to download this book before the archive date, so I'm not able to leave a review. I look forward to reading and reviewing books by this author in the future.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thank you NetGalley!

Wow, I really enjoyed this book.
We meet our MC Matt Kim whom is struggling with feelings of inadequacy and if he's "disappearing."
The unique storyline here is that doppelgangers of himself and his girlfriend exist. He's jealous of his doppelganger. He thinks the doppelganger is more successful and all around better than he is.

This book wont' be everyone. There are some twists here, some.. interesting and unique "imagery" as well. The plot is insaney interesting, and you'll have plenty to think about as you read this book.

Not my kind of book, I was hoping to read something very different than this. Maybe i will reread this some other time.
3 stars for me

It was a very enjoyable novel. Refreshingly strange but also incredibly familiar, as if the story manifests a sorry many have known in their lives but have kept inside.

Smartly written but extremely strange and bizarre and unfortunately I couldn’t follow the narrative as intended. I can appreciate the writer is great at writing however the plot was a bit all over the place for me

Well this was different. Not at all what I thought it would be. It was a book about social commentary, being a different course in a white supremacy country, a little mystery thrown in. This book has absolutely everything you could want. What an interesting book.

When I first came across this title, I wanted to know more. I thought this would be a fun sci fi or magical realism but this turned out to be more than that! I was pleasantly surprised by its depth and layers. This is a book that I would definitely reread and recommend others as well!

It took me an absurdly lengthy amount of time to read this book; I've picked it up and put it down a dozen times. It was complicated. My sincere apologies to Little A Publishing and the author for the tardiness of the review. Thanks to Little A and Netgalley for providing this ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear is complex and multilayered. It reminds me of one of my favourite movies, Inception, where one falls through one layer and discovers another one and another one until all sense of reality and identity and surroundings are shattered.

First level: disappearing adopted Korean man in the United States left by his wife and daughter discovers there is another 'better' more 'successful ' (loaded words) copy of him out there. His current girlfriend Yumi also has a doppelgänger.

My thoughts with the first 20%: this is obviously going to be about the metaphorical invisibility and emasculization of Asian males in the West. This Matt Kim is written as the typical apathetic melancholic Eeyorish Asian guy figure, like in Murakami novels where strange things happen. Reading this is like wading through treacle made with tears. The writing's awkward, especially this passage about the place in between walls. Maybe a DNF.

In between level: Catherine Chung has endorsed the book. Oh look, there's another upcoming book by the same author on Netgalley non-fiction about how craft of writing norms were established by white male authors and we need to interrogate and reimagine storytelling, plot, content - both readers and writers.

My reaction: Part of the reason why I dislike the apathetic Asian character is that it wrongly gives the stereotype of Asians being the submissive, law-abiding robotic model minority. I want to read and meet rabble-rousing, rule-breaking, creative, eye-catching leading Asians. But if Matthew Salesses is calling attention to this, then perhaps he is being subversive. Let's read on.

Next level: Attention to the toxic white dudebro culture and the wider surreal fractures in the American mosaic. WM/AF couples featured with the white male being domineering. ICE raids, MAHA (not a typo) red hats, BLM march, white dudes with rifles in groups. Oppressed minorities. Matt Kim's Korean parents died because they were trying to assimilate. How to raise a biracial kid in this world? In connection to...

Another level non-linear: Adoption ("How did the word adoption become so unironic"), foster kids in crates. Matt Kim's Korean parents died when he was young (then he was adopted by white Catholic parents) but Matt Chung's Korean parents who look exactly alike are alive but aged. This is likely what Korean adoptees often contemplate: what if I had grown up within my Korean family, would I be more confident and rooted, less lost?
"(How many times can you hear “Go back to your country” before you lose your sense of country?)"
Many unique aspects of Korean culture: the belief that sleeping with fans on will kill, Arirang, folktale of Hong Gildong, Hangul characters, exercise books with boxes to practice characters. Quantum physics including Schrodinger's cat, a dog-cat hybrid and multiverses are evoked to explore parallel possibilities. The author's name makes a cameo but he's a nerdy white guy in the novel. Who are the disappeared, the murdered, the silenced and who are the aggressors? Meta is an understatement.

How to break out of this multi-existence conundrum and quandary? Kill the versions of one self? Hop worlds? Matthew Salessess writes a few mind twisters (in an aptly titled chapter 'Who killed Vincent Chin?') such as

" Our resistance is our respect for existence. To know how we disappear is to know how to recognize each other. To know how to recognize each other’s disappearance is to know how to appear."

"We are always there, in a present without presence. We desire presence because we live in a world in which we never know what the present means. To look for presence is to stand in a perspective of absence."

Having recently finished Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong, it dovetailed nicely into the points Mr Salesses makes: "To be Asian American is to risk a superposition, not one or zero but a set of probabilities under varied circumstances. It is to refuse dichotomy. It is to resist what’s essentially a colonial separation: one world into two."

Then reading the acknowledgement section, all rational thoughts of a critically objective review flees.

A disturbing tale about assimilating in a country where the president incites violent prejudice, the main character Matt Kim feels himself slowly disappearing. Learning that there are other versions of his girlfriend and himself, he believes he may be transitioning to another dimension, perhaps to the one in which his doppelganger disappeared. Salesses describes the ambiguity of fearing and desiring being invisible, not knowing which could be safer. I highly recommend this novel for the storyline and for learning about different perspectives. I was fortunate to receive a digital copy from the publisher Little A through NetGalley.

This is a strange surreal little book. Nothing in it is as it seems or as it should be. I found it a difficult read and had difficulty connecting to the book and the characters. I didn't really enjoy it.

Thank you for sending me this ARC.

This book is such a mind trip, but in a good way. It uses doubles (and doppelgangers, obviously) in an amazing way that really gets to the heart of identity and sense of self. The author also loves wordplay, and weaves it in throughout. I love the complete disorientation and unraveling this book takes you through. I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it!

Matt Kim is disappearing. How else to explain why people are ignoring him or bumping into him? Besides, every night he passes out, and things vanish from his apartment. His family left him, leaving an empty purple bedroom. And his cat also just died, but he can still hear its ghost from between the walls.

The sense of disappearing is all in his head, his girlfriend Yumi insists. Except she then meets her doppelgänger . . . who once dated someone who was a cooler, more successful version of Matt. But this double actually did disappear. Is this what lies in store for our fading protagonist?

"Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear" is an absurdist work of fiction in which the events feel inspired by the mind of David Lynch . . . if he were Asian American. Both wildly funny and horrific in its observations, the novel is an unsettling examination about identity and one's place in the world.

As an Asian American, Matt Kim lives in the liminal world of citizen and foreigner. But that's not his only ambivalent status: he's also a father and husband but rejected as both by his ex-family; in trying to uncover the mystery of the other Matt, he becomes predator and prey; and in the office "as a hetero Asian male, employment always made me feel sexless and shenanigan-less."

Even his daughter Charlotte – who's hapa and therefore is both white and Asian – is a teenager, neither child nor adult and somehow both simultaneously. And in science fiction, to be Asian is to both possess ancient wisdom but also alien technology.

Salesses, who also wrote the bestselling novel "The Hundred-Year Flood," piles on the many ways that Asian Americans are marginalized and Othered, but infuses dark humor into every line as he embraces the absurdity of that imposed dichotomous existence. He even plays with puns, a form of wordplay that embraces duality, and therefore is touted as the "language aof rebellion." (And yes, our humble author is also a "Matt," which is no mere coincidence.)

With sly references to presidential candidates endorsed by the KKK, men wearing red hats, and finding purpose through protest, "Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear" is a novel for our present moment in America, a moment that has been centuries in the making. It's a story that asks what lengths one must go to in order to be seen.

This book was too strange for me. Supposedly it is about the invisibility of Asian Americans and the stereotypes applied to them. I will have to take other people’s word for that, because I couldn’t make it past the 20% point. I really disliked the writing style. “I hadn’t disappeared yet, which meant I was still disappearing, which meant my appearance depended on doing nothing to change my appearance.” If you want to read a great book covering those same themes, try “Interior Chinatown” by Charles Hu. I also suggest that you ignore all of the five star reviews that this book as gotten from other authors.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher

Honestly, I did not love this book. It took me a very long time to get through it, and it felt like a fever dream the whole time. The premise sounds fascinating - actually quite like the 2013 film The Double, both in tone and plot. But the main characters were not interesting to me, and I didn't feel as though the deeper, existential questions were fleshed out or presented in a way that made me reflect. I would skip this book and go straight to Richard Ayoade's fantastic, unsettling film with Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska.

I appreciate having had an opportunity to read and review this book. The appeal of this particular book was not evident to me, and if I cannot file a generally positive review I prefer simply to advise the publisher to that effect and file no review at all.

I won't rate this book as I DNFed it... but I'll explain why I did it.

First, from the first page, I knew the writing-style was not for me. It's not bad, it's even really good, but not my style at all.
Then, there is all the Doppelgänger part of the story: I wasn't expecting this at all. It was strange, but not my kind of strange. I felt I was struggling through each page, it wasn't enjoyable, and I didn't want to force myself to finish this book and resent it for that.

I really disliked only one thing: it was the final straw.


Maybe I'll try to get back to this book later. But, really, I just don't think it's made for me, or me for it.

Matthew Salesses' "Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear" is a deeply strange story of a man named Matt trying to exist and find himself. He feels like he is disappearing. His parents have left him and his wife and daughter have left him. His girlfriend, Yumi does not believe him when he says he is disappearing. She then runs into a woman who looks exactly like her. This identical looking person dated a person who looks exactly like Matt who has disappeared. These are the plot lines that I can actually describe. From there, I sort of lose track of the thread of the book. While there are some overarching themes that tie to book to present times (president who the KKK endorses, people wearing red hats), I feel like I'm missing something. Adding to the confusing is partway through the book there is a third character named Matt, who has the author's name that is inserted. Unfortunately this book went over my head and was too difficult to follow.

Thank you to NetGalley and Little A for proving me this advance reader copy for review.

Disappear Doppelganger Disappear had a very interesting and intriguing synopsis. But I could not enjoy it. It was very smart but required me to concentrate a little to much. I wasn't pulled in to the story in way I would normally like. I like to get lost in a story. I was was getting lost in my own thoughts instead. Maybe at another point in my life I would really enjoy this book and how thoughtful it is. But as of right now I am looking for something that will make my everyday disappear and fill me with wonder and excitement.

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Existentialism updated for the 21st century

This is the rare book that pulls you along by making you think deeply in addition to making you care about the characters and their struggles.

Matt Kim, the novel's protagonist, has been disappearing. Or at least he thinks so. On top of that, he's not seen his young daughter in years, partly because he doesn't want his weirdness to make her weird. Or something. On top of that, he's adopted and has lost both sets of his parents. More on that below.

With its narrator's probing but sometimes absurd questions on the nature of existence and reality, DISAPPEAR, DOPPELGANGER, DISAPPEAR brought me back to the world of Jean Paul Sartre's novel, NAUSEA, which I read as a teenager. Other literary echos I heard were Kafka (the surrealism of The State) and Dostoevsky (the concept of The Double), and because of the humor that's threaded through the book, I couldn't help wondering if the author was delivering these riffs with a bit of a smirk. I laughed hilariously at many points in the novel.

Throughout history, adopted people have been the subject of stories, especially heroic stories. In this novel, the doppelganger motif adds another layer to the traditional tale of the adopted outsider who challenges the status quo. Matt Kim was one person with his first parents, who immigrated to the U.S. from Korea, and then became his own doppelganger when adopted by a set of white parents at age twelve. Some of the most affecting passages in the book are those where Matt Kim recalls his fear of not being adopted, and then of not being kept, and how he enacts a new self to stay safe. If one can create a new self, it starts to make sense that the self can be disappeared. And, it makes sense that one's double can exist in the same world, simultaneously. And doubling complicates everything.

Highly recommend this book, especially for readers who enjoy surrealism and suspense.

Many thanks to Net Galley for providing an advanced review copy.

Even with it's strong writing I just couldn't get this book. Strange and different. Beers off in different directions. Am glad I did read it because the writing is solid. Check it out. Might be your thing. Happy reading!