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Barnes & Noble has crowned Katie Yee the winner of its 2025 Discover Prize for debut fiction, selecting her remarkable novel Maggie; Or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar from a shortlist of six fresh literary voices announced earlier this month.
The story begins with a dinner date gone terribly wrong: a woman expecting a lovely evening instead learns that her husband is having an affair — with a woman named Maggie. Soon after, she discovers another Maggie — a tumor in her breast. What follows is a fragmented, fiercely original journey through heartbreak, illness and self-reclamation, all told with the sharp humor of someone who refuses to surrender to despair.
“Yes, it’s a novel about bleak topics (cancer, divorce), but I hope it also encourages the question: What do you reach for when everything feels bad?” Yee wrote in a Barnes & Noble blog post about her debut. “For our narrator, it’s the bedtime stories she tells her kids, culled from her childhood; her best friend; and a healthy dose of humor.”
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Yee’s narrator turns pain into punchlines, finding poetry in the absurd. She writes bedtime stories drawn from Chinese folklore, converses with her tumor, and even drafts a “user manual” for her husband’s mistress. The result, as critics have noted, is “as playful as it is profound,” drawing comparisons to Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and Jenny Offill’s fragmented, modernist style.
The novel has been spotlighted across major summer reading lists — from The New York Times and TIME to Harper’s Bazaar and Oprah Daily — and The Washington Post praised it as “witty, full of heart and beautiful poetic prose.”
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In her author essay, Yee reflected on how humor became a form of survival:
“I wanted to look at the ways we use it to connect with people or to cope. There’s a thin line between comedy and tragedy — much like the thin line between a joke and a plain sentence. Anti-jokes are so interesting because they prey on your idea of a joke, they play with your expectations, the way that life really is.”
With Maggie, that thin line becomes the novel’s beating heart. By folding grief into laughter and myth, Yee offers a debut that is both a love letter to resilience and a wink at life’s cruel punchlines.
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