Adult Readers Archives - Page 108 of 154

The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun by Gretchen Rubin [in Christian Science Monitor]

07 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost

Before I even finished the book, I had already preordered multiple copies of Gretchen Rubin’s latest title, The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. Which...

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn

05 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, African, Cambodian, Chinese American, Indian, Middle Eastern, Nonfiction, Southeast Asian

Half the Sky is a remarkable, life-changing book. It should be required reading for all adults (and more mature young adults), but especially for us overprivileged, lucky-solely-by-chance-of-birth citizens of the West. If there is ONE book you read this new year, let it be this...

Arzee the Dwarf by Chandrahas Choudhury

03 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Indian, South Asian

The eponymous Arzee is a diminutive young man in his late 20s living with his mother and younger brother in crowded Bombay, swaggeringly looking forward to the near future. In spite of the difficulties he's faced (much of which he blames on his size), he's convinced his life...

In the Convent of Little Flowers: Stories by Indu Sundaresan

02 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Indian, Indian American, Short Stories, South Asian, South Asian American

First things first: Indu Sundaresan’s only (thus far) short story collection (she’s best known for her lengthy historical novels, The Twentieth Wife and Feast of Roses) is definitely an effective read. Many of the stories make you think beyond your immediate world as they temporarily...

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

01 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction

Four years ago (could say five, actually, as we just entered 2010 – already!), University of Chicago economics professor Steven Levitt and noted journalist Stephen Dubner debuted with Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. That first duo-effort quickly became a mega-bestseller...

The Disappeared by Kim Echlin

31 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Cambodian, Canadian, Fiction, Southeast Asian

One Halloween night when Anne Greves is 16, she goes with older friends to a jazz club and falls in love for the first time in her young life. Serey is an older man, already in his 20s, a musician, who has already lived too...

Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka by Adele Barker [in Christian Science Monitor]

30 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, Sri Lankan

Three weeks after 9/11, University of Arizona professor Adele Barker arrived in Sri Lanka as a senior Fulbright Scholar to teach Russian literature, feminist literary theory, and American literature to select students at the University of Peradeniya. But her own education about the history and...

Wait Until Twilight: A Novel by Sang Pak

28 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean American, Nonethnic-specific

Samuel Polk is 16, athletic, has good friends, and lives in a small southern town in Georgia. He tells everyone he's gotten over his mother's sudden death a year ago. While his relationship with his father isn't the closest, they've managed to establish a daily...

The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Polly McLean with an introduction by Khaled Hosseini

17 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Afghan, Fiction, Translation

Winner of Le Prix Goncourt 2008, considered France's highest literary honor, this disturbingly powerful slim volume gives voice to the too-many silenced women living "[s]omewhere in Afghanistan or elsewhere." Written almost like a dramatic play script complete with what read like stage directions – not...

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms by Fumiyo Kouno, translated by Naoko Amemiya and Andy Nakatani, edited by Patrick Macias and Colin Turner

16 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Middle Grade Readers, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Slim and gorgeous, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, couldn't be more different from the 10-volume, powerfully resonating Barefoot Gen series in scope and style. But don't let its whimsical beauty fool you for a moment ...

Barefoot Gen: Never Give Up (vol. 10) by Keiji Nakazawa, translated by Project Gen

15 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Memoir, Middle Grade Readers, Translation, Young Adult Readers

The final volume of Keiji Nakazawa's 10-part Barefoot Gen series begins in March 1953, almost eight years after the widespread decimation of August 1945 caused by American-dropped atomic bombs. Gen and his friends have established a routine in their young lives, with Ryuta, Katsuko, and Musubi working...

Barefoot Gen: Breaking Down Borders (vol. 9) by Keiji Nakazawa, translated by Project Gen

14 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Memoir, Middle Grade Readers, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Hiroshima survivor Keiji Nakazawa's graphic testimony continues in the penultimate volume of the heart-wrenching Barefoot Gen series, finally available in an unabridged English translation of all 10 volumes from San Francisco's renegade publisher Last Gasp. Alone and newly homeless, Nakazawa's fictionalized stand-in, Gen Nakaoka, moves in with...

20th Century Boys (vol. 06) by Naoki Urasawa, with the cooperation of Takashi Nagasaki, English adaptation by Akemi Wegmüller

11 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Strong, no-nonsense, independent Kanna takes center stage again in volume 06 (that's her in color on the cover), in a world shrouded by the choking control of the all-powerful Friends. When bumbling Detective Chono comes looking for drag queen Britney, Kanna know she's got to...

What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell

10 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Young Adult Readers

Confession: This is not my favorite Malcolm Gladwell title. But that's not to say that I didn't enjoy parts of it more than probably 75% of the titles collected in this whole blog. Really. Gladwell is one phenomenal, erudite entertainer ...

Publisher Profile: Madras Press [in Bookslut]

08 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Author Interview/Profile, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost, Short Stories

A Quartet of Unsalable Gems: Madras Press Debuts Series One A modern eco-fable about an almost-royal swan and just-a-common-bluebird couple whose lives intersect with a miner and a logger who turn away from their destructive careers… a contemporary fairy tale about a witch with one heck...

Ōoku: The Inner Chambers (vol. 2) by Fumi Yoshinaga, translated by Akemi Wegmüller

07 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Translation

Although the second volume of Ōoku, a recently introduced (in translation) gender-bender series, this latest could definitely read as a stand-alone love story. And quite a unique and memorable one at that! The series' premise is that in an alternative history of premodern Edo Japan, the mysterious...

Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang, foreword by Frank Rich

02 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, Chinese American, Drama/Theater

Surely, I have never been part of a more raucous audience than when I saw David Henry Hwang's latest play, Yellow Face, at New York's Public Theater in December 2007. The man at the end of the row in front of us LITERALLY FELL OUT...

Why Evolution Is True by Jerry A. Coyne

01 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction

Here's the assertion: "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals." In a 2006 poll given to adults in 32 countries, the resulting U.S. statistics were just plain staggering to me ...

Short Girls by Bich Minh Nguyen

27 Nov, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Southeast Asian American, Vietnamese American

At first impression, the story is very familiar: two American-born sisters of Vietnamese American immigrants – one the high-achieving 'good' daughter with her law degree, the other the 'lost' daughter with fast friends and temporary jobs that never last long. But in Bich Minh Nguyen's heart-string-pulling...

Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka 006 by Naoki Urasawa and Osamu Tezuka, co-authored by Takashi Nagasaki, with the cooperation of Tezuka Productions

24 Nov, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Europol's greatest robot, Inspector Gesicht, arrives in Persia on a "hunch" – can robots have hunches? – that he's finally figured out who's behind all the gruesome murders of the world's greatest robots. The trail takes him to Amsterdam where he follows the mysterious Sahad,...

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