Rachel Khong’s My Dear You Captures ‘How It Feels To Be a Human Being’ — See the Cover! (Exclusive)

Rachel Khong has a new book coming soon.

PEOPLE can exclusively reveal the cover of the bestselling author’s upcoming short story collection, My Dear You. The book will be published next year through Knopf.

Khong, known for novels like her 2017 debut Goodbye Vitamin, as well as the 2024 bestseller Real Americans, covers a range of topics in her latest release. In one story, an alternate reality sees the U.S. government injecting citizens with a new drug that allows them to only see people of their same race and gender. In other stories, a woman learns her newly-adopted cat can conjure the spirits of her exes, and God decides to get rid of humans altogether.

“Along the way, the characters stop to consider interventions from the supernatural, the earthly, the robotic and the immortal,” reads the book’s official synopsis.

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Khong tells PEOPLE that the stories in My Dear You have been accumulating for “roughly a decade,” and that it traces a pivotal time in her own life.

“I think of it as a document of my thirties, of a particular kind of maturing,” the author explains. “If there’s a unifying theme, it’s the mid-life realization that life is finite: that we don’t get to lead all possible lives, or go down all possible paths. It’s about mourning that sense of possibility, but also about finding beauty in our limits.”

“The stories are about love, marriage, infertility and friendship; they’re playful and vulnerable at the same time. Each story is extremely personal to me,” Khong continues. “‘Personal’ doesn’t mean ‘autobiographical’: it’s more that the stories capture, to the best of my ability, how it feels to be a human being, or more specifically, how it has felt, to me, to be alive.”

Khong also notes how the book’s cover art ties into some of its central themes.

“Being a human is more than a little strange, and I love the cover, designed by Linda Huang and illustrated by Julia Dufossé, that captures this feeling so perfectly.”

My Dear You will be published on April 7, 2026 and is now available for preorder, wherever books are sold.