In this book, V.S.Naipaul returns to the country which continues to intrigue and inspire him and about which he wrote "An Area of Darkness" in 1964, a semi-autobiographical account of a year spent in India. Now, twenty-five years later, he goes back to that country, returning to the places he visited years ago and talking to people of all types and at all levels of society. Naipaul started writing in 1954 he has won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornd...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE • A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness “Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen In development as a television series starring and adapted by Greta Lee • One of Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • Named One of the Best Book...
In his long-overdue first collection of essays, noted journalist and NPR commentator Andrew Lam explores his lifelong struggle for identity as a Viet Kieu, or a Vietnamese national living abroad. At age eleven, Lam, the son of a South Vietnamese general, came to California on the eve of the fall of Saigon to communist forces. He traded his Vietnamese name for a more American one and immersed himself in the allure of the American dream: something not clearly defined for him or his family. Reflect...
A historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, of students, wanderers, martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic record of a journey through Uzbekistan and of the strange shifts, encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour followi...
This is the personal account of a man who grew up in China and witnessed the tumultuous years of the cultural revolution. Born in Nanjing in 1958, Zhu Xiao Di was the son of eductated party members and whose father and uncles were influential underground and military leaders during the revolution.
Few writers have led as storied a life as Setouchi Jakuchō. Writer, translator, feminist, peace activist, Buddhist nun . . . even this list cannot contain the impressive sweep of her career. Along the way she has also been daughter, wife, mother, mistress, lover, role model, and femme fatale. Through each twist and turn, she has reacted with both feisty verve and self-reproving reflection. Basho (Places), superbly translated here by Liza Dalby, enjoins readers to accompany the author as she tra...
Bob Santos was a hero in an urban hamlet called the International District, an Asian American neighborhood in Seattle. As a leader of a powerful grassroots movement in the 1970s and 80s, he helped rescue the area from decay and helped foster a dynamic new sense of community. In this colorful autobiography, "Uncle Bob" Santos shares memories of this eventful era. He also tells of his childhood in the International District with his father, a famous local boxer; his participation in the drive for...
“Lucky for me, Taipei was in the midst of transforming itself into a food lover’s paradise at the exact time I appeared on the scene.” So begins Carolyn Phillips’s journey as a language student in 1970s Taiwan that culminated with her becoming a traditional Chinese family’s eldest daughter-in-law. Through beguiling stories that stretch across four decades, she recalls how she fell in love with a man who seduced her with everything from simple homely meals to haute cuisine, from crabs stir-fried...
From M.G. Vassanji, two-time Giller Prize winner and a GG winner for Non-fiction, comes a poignant love letter to his birthplace and homeland, East Africa--a powerful and surprising portrait that only an insider could write. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part history-rarely-told, here is a powerful and timely portrait of a constantly evolving land. From a description of Zanzibar and its evolution to a visit to a slave-market town at Lake Tanganyika; from an encounter with a witchdoctor...
Nikki Haley has been widely hailed as an emerging force in American politics, her star power burnished over a decade that has seen her move from the national spotlight to the global stage. In Rising Star, political scientist Jason A. Kirk analyzes her ascendance in the Republican party, from her governorship of South Carolina as a woman of color—where she faced extraordinary challenges in a state reckoning with tragedy, race, and its own history—to her elevated profile as Donald Trump’s represen...
While East Meets West: A Chinese Diaspora Scholar And Social Activist In Asia-pacific
by Ching-hwang Yen
Born in South China before 1949, brought up and educated in Southeast Asia and Australia, and having worked in Southeast Asia, Australia and Hong Kong, Professor Yen has a unique personal experience in telling the fascinating stories of the encounter and clashes of cultural and social values between East and West. Imbued with many traditional Chinese cultural values such as diligence, perseverance, resilience and determination, in this book, he tells his life story of how he was determined to cl...
A Cambodian survivor unrolls the reels of her memory to give us this heart-wrenching memoir of growing up under the brutal Khmer Rouge. Chanrithy Him felt compelled to tell of surviving life under the Khmer Rouge in a way "worthy of the suffering which I endured as a child." In the Cambodian proverb, "when broken glass floats" is the time when evil triumphs over good. That time began in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took power in Cambodia and the Him family began their trek through the hell of the...