The Free Stuff: The Souls of Yellow Folk

I’m not here to stop you from buying Wesley Yang’s stunning essay collection, The Souls of Yellow Folk. Buy it for the title alone! Buy it for the first essay, about Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, which is probably the darkest and smartest examination of mass shootings ever, a piece worth underlining and dog-earing until you can recite passages by heart.

The Souls of Yellow Folk is already one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2018, and you’re definitely gonna see it on our 10 Best Books of 2018 list. Heck, I bought it myself. So buy it already.

But also, 12 of the collection’s 13 essays are available online for free, and I have gathered them here for your convenience, along with a few extras.

The Face of Seung-Hui Cho

Paper Tigers

Eddie Huang Against the World

The Life and Afterlife of Aaron Swartz

The Liveliest Mind in New York

The Terrorist Search Engine

On Francis Fukuyama

Inside the Box

On Reading the Sex Diaries

Game Theory

We Out Here

Is It OK to Be White