Night Sessions is based primarily on David S. Cho's life experiences as a Chicago-born and raised child of Korean immigrants to America in the early 1970's

This volume examines the engagement with national histories, citizenship, and the larger transnational contexts in the narrative plot lines in selected twentieth-century Korean American novels. Critics have often expected, or even demanded, that the Korean American novel present the ideal and coherent American citizen-subject in a linear bildungsroman plotline.

Many novels - Younghill Kang's East Goes West, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee, Chang-rae Lee's A Gesture Life, to name a few - do deal with the idea of an "American identity," however, they...