Winner of the Sakutaro Hagiwara Prize and the Murasaki Shikibu Prize Caught between two cultures, award-winning author Hiromi Ito tackles subjects like aging, death, and suffering with dark humor, illuminating the bittersweet joys of being alive. The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As...
Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its memb...
Winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Fiction Award. A new Novel-in-Stories that New York Times bestselling author Jillian Lauren calls "a delicious indulgence." Daring yet aimless, smart but slightly strange, Cake Time?s young female protagonist keeps making slippery choices, sliding into the dangerous space where curiosity melds with fear and desires turn into dirty messes. In ?How Not to Have an Abortion,? the teenaged narrator looks for a ride from the clinic between her AP exams. In ?Easy...
This novel gives a first-person perspective of adolescence in Shanghai in the 1950s and 60s, a time of upheaval and daily drama in the live of even the most ordinary of people. Through the perspective of our young narrator, we can observe the social reality of the time, impacted by the enormous tide of political changes.We follow our narrator as he navigates the difficulties anyone might face in growing up: shifting loyalties among friends, conflicts with teacher and other significant adults in...
Best Books of 2018 Kirkus Reviews (debut and short fiction categories) Best Books of 2018, Entropy Magazine A Book Club selection for The Wing, Rebel Women's Lit and Bookish.com 35 over 35 Debut Fiction Award Finalist for the 2019 PEN American Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection "Chaya Bhuvaneswar's debut collection maps with great assurance the intricate outer reaches of the human heart. What a bold, smart, exciting new voice, well worth listening to; what an elegant s...
In the title story of this timely and innovative collection, a young woman wearing a Prada coat attempts to redeem a coupon for plastic storage bins while her in-laws are at home watching the Chinese news and taking her private phone calls. It is the lively and wise juxtaposition of cultures, generations, and emotions that characterize May-lee Chai’s amazing stories. Within them, readers will find a complex blend of cultures spanning China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and finally, the world...
Ming, born in a bleak outpost of Sichuan province, finds an unexpected glimpse of the world beyond when she meets a talking monkey with golden eyes and supernatural abilities—the immortal Monkey King, with whom Ming’s destiny is inextricably intertwined. Determined to become a writer, Ming finds her way to New York, but to make ends meet she goes to work for a crime ring and returns to China on the lam. Hope arrives in the form of her American friend Zoe. Together, they travel to the village of...
Beginning in Saigon during the Vietnam War and ending in present day New York, Catinat Boulevard tells the story of two friends Mai and Mai Ly. While Mai flirts with American GIs in rowdy bars along Catinat Boulevard, Mai Ly joins the communist resistance in the jungle. The story also follows Nat, Mai's half Vietnamese-half African-American son abandoned in a Saigon orphanage.
From debut fiction writer Carla Crujido comes a delicately intertwined, fairytale-inspired collection of short stories. Part vivid historical drama, part melancholy fever dream, The Strange Beautiful centers on Mount Vernon Apartments in Spokane, Washington, offering a glimpse into the lives of ten tenants over a period of one hundred years. In the opening story, "The Songbird," we meet the building's caretaker, a WWI veteran trying to rebuild his life amidst the Spanish flu pandemic. In "The...
Strawberry Yellow: A Mas Arai Mystery (The Mas Arai Mystery, #5)
by Naomi Hirahara
Pangs of Love and Other Writings (Classics of Asian American Literature)
by David Wong Louie
An apprentice sushi chef and a mysterious blue-eyed woman share a bottle of wine inside a climate-controlled otter tank. The Great Wall of China grumbles as workers forego construction to watch an imperial game of baseball. A young woman tries to imagine a future unsullied by her family’s history of untimely death.First issued in 1991, Pangs of Love introduced David Wong Louie’s bold storytelling. The son of Chinese immigrants, he centered his stories around characters who are in conflict with t...
Rosie "Aunty" Lee, the feisty widow, amateur sleuth, and proprietor of Singapore's best-loved home cooking restaurant, is back in another delectable, witty mystery involving scandal and murder among the city's elite. Few know more about what goes on in Singapore than Aunty Lee. When a scandal over illegal organ donation involving prominent citizens makes news, she already has a list of suspects. There's no time to snoop, though-Aunty Lee's Delights is catering a brunch for local socialites Henr...
In your heart there will always be a small ache reminding you that a place waits for your return. The dancers pause. The singers call. The fireflies await. Secret desires, unfulfilled longing, and irrepressible humor flow through the stories of Wakako Yamauchi, writings that depict the lives of Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans. Through the medium of Yamauchi's storytelling, readers enter the world of desert farmers, factory workers, gamblers, housewives, con artists, and dreamers. El...
“Vi Khi Nao's fictional language is full of magical slippages ... an esoteric sadness seeps up through surface deadpan and pizzazz." —Jonathan Lethem A mesmerizing epistolary tale of a sensual queer love affair set against the backdrop of Las Vegas' gritty underbelly. The Italy Letters is a slim, powerful shot of literary fantasia from one of America’s best-kept secrets. Long an underground favorite, visionary writer Vi Khi Nao weaves an unforgettable and highly distinctive story of a love a...
A Publishers Weekly Best Books 2022: Comics pick A Career in Books is a graphic novel for everyone who's wanted to "work with books" and had NO idea what it entailed. It's for those who were taken aback by that first paycheck. It's for those who wanted a literary career even in the face of systemic racism, who dealt with the unique challenges of coming from an immigrant family, and whose group chat is their lifeline. Shirin, Nina, and Silvia have just gotten their first jobs in publishing, at...
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals of Excellence Winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize Winner of the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA) Best Book Award A harrowing and redemptive immigrant story for readers of Pachinko A Chinese railroad worker and his young daughter—sold into servitude—in 19th century California search for family, fulfillment, and belonging in a violent new land "Heaven and earth do not pick and choose. They see everything as straw dogs." A sweeping...
This debut novel pulls at the threads in the (cashmere) sweater of academia in a witty take-down of racial inequality at prep schools, perfect for fans of Such a Fun Age and Little Fires Everywhere. Wesley Friends School is Washington, DC’s most prestigious prep school, so of course Aki Hiyashi-Brown is proud to teach at it and send her daughter Meg there. Why wouldn't she be proud? Parents kill to have their kid enrolled at Wesley. Not only is Wesley the premier academic destination for the ch...
Revealing glimpses of the Philippine Revolution and the Filipino writer Jose Rizal emerge despite the worst efforts of feuding academics in Apostol’s hilariously erudite novel, which won the Philippine National Book Award. Gina Apostol’s riotous second novel takes the form of a memoir by one Raymundo Mata, a half-blind bookworm and revolutionary, tracing his childhood, his education in Manila, his love affairs, and his discovery of writer and fellow revolutionary, Jose Rizal. Mata’s 19th-cent...
In the face of a slow but impending apocalypse, what binds three seemingly divergent lives (a writer, a photographer, an old man), isn’t the commonality of a perceived future death, but the layered and complex fabric of how loss, abuse, trauma, and death have shaped their pasts, and how these pasts continue to haunt their present moments, a moment in which time seems to be running out. The writer, traumatized by the violent death of her mother when she was a child, lives alone with her dog and s...
Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he...