Superfan

From National Book Foundation 5 UNDER 35 HONOREE Jenny Tinghui Zhang, a novel about a pop idol and his superfan, whose stories shockingly collide Freshman Minnie is adrift at college in Austin, Texas, when she discovers a boy band called HOURglass and the online forums that worship them. She especially loves Halo, whose sharp edges feel somehow familiar. After a brief romance goes painfully awry, Minnie pours everything into her new fandom, clinging to each livestream and bonding with other fans online. But when a scandal threatens to expose Halo to harm, Minnie decides that she is the only one who can save him. Except Halo's secret is darker than anything the tabloids could imagine. Before he was a superstar heartthrob, he was Eason: a high school dropout haunted by a tragic accident. When he is recruited for HOURglass, it feels like a chance to become someone else. And when he is onstage in front of his fans, he can almost forget the horrors of his past--until one of those very fans threatens to destroy everything. Dazzling, entrancing, and deeply heartfelt, Superfan is about fandom in all its magic and its terror, and the extreme lengths to which we go to rid ourselves of loneliness. Author Biography: Jenny Tinghui Zhang is a Chinese-American writer and author of the novel Four Treasures of the Sky (Flatiron Books), which has been translated into 12 languages and short and longlisted for the Chautauqua Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her work has appeared in The Cut, Foreign Policy, and The New York Times, among others. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree and has received support from Yaddo, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, VONA/Voices, Tin House, and the University of Wyoming, where she completed her MFA. Her second novel Superfan is forthcoming from Flatiron Books in 2026.