Adult Readers Archives - Page 113 of 154

Unpolished Gem: My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me by Alice Pung

Already a many-time-many-variety award-winner in her native Australia, Alice Pung's debut memoir arrives Stateside filled with humor and bittersweet grace. Born one month after her family arrived in Melbourne, Australia, after fleeing the killing fields of Cambodia, Pung's father chooses her name for "a story...

Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka 001 by Naoki Urasawa and Osamu Tezuka, co-authored by Takashi Nagasaki, supervised by Macoto Tezka

07 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Osamu Tezuka, the godfather of manga, introduced his beloved Tetsuwan Atom – better known in the West as Astro Boy – way back in 1951. The adorable robot boy became a worldwide phenomenon, thanks to his animated incarnation that began in 1963. Since then, somewhere, somehow,...

32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics by Adrian Tomine

05 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese American, Nonethnic-specific, Young Adult Readers

You've gotta love this boxed set of eight little mini-comic books. As a not-so-cool high school student (the first picture you see once you slide out the contents) who didn't have much of a social life, Adrian Tomine had quite the cool other-life, inking comics...

Silver Phoenix: Beyond the Kingdom of Xia by Cindy Pon

05 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese, Chinese American, Fiction, Young Adult Readers

Debut novelist Cindy Pon undoubtedly knows how to tell a story: Silver Phoenix is an exciting tale about a village teenager in ancient China who escapes a potential marriage with the over-wived town lech and goes on a great adventure through magical worlds to rescue her beloved...

Once the Shore: Stories by Paul Yoon [in San Francisco Chronicle]

27 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Korean American, Repost, Short Stories

I have to say it: ‘Yoon’ rhymes with ‘swoon’ for a reason! ...

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

24 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction

Who doesn't want to be happy? This so-called "modern classic" examines the different ways people can achieve "optimal experience" through a powerful combination of challenge, engagement, and an ultimate sense of accomplishment. Can't argue with that ...

Johnny Hiro {half asian, all hero} by Fred Chao, with greytones by Dylan Babb and letters and edits by Jesse Post

19 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, Chinese American, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Hapa/Mixed-race, Japanese American, Young Adult Readers

The peaceful slumber of Johnny Hiro and girlfriend Mayumi Murakami in their rent-controlled (run-down) New York City apartment, is rudely interrupted by Gozadilla (that extra 'a' is not a typo), who couldn't make it as a killer monster in Tokyo so has come to New...

Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell

19 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction

So I'm getting on the Gladwell bandwagon a little late – and seemingly going backwards, too. Outliers floored me last month. And I'm hoping to get to The Tipping Point by next month. But timing is everything: I think I was meant to read Blink now because I have...

Atlas of Unknowns by Tania James

18 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Indian, Indian American, South Asian, South Asian American

Anju Melvin, used to being first in the classrooms of her hometown of Kumarakom in India's southern state of Kerala, wins herself a scholarship for a year aboard at an elite private high school in Manhattan. But what clinches the award is not her own...

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer [in San Francisco Chronicle]

17 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, British, European, Fiction, Indian, Repost, South Asian

Geoff Dyer's latest novel, teasingly titled Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, is quite the mind game. To play, you obviously have to read the book. Here's the initial setup: two distinct parts with a few overlapping similarities. In the first, "Jeff in Venice," London journalist...

In Defense of Our Neighbors: The Walt and Milly Woodward Story by Mary Woodward, foreword by David Guterson

15 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Japanese American, Nonfiction, Young Adult Readers

If such things are possible, this is actually (almost) a happy book about the Japanese American internment experience, as improbable as that sounds. Yes, the unfortunate Americans of Japanese descent who lived on Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound across from Seattle, Washington – who made up a...

Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie

13 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, Afghan, British, British Asian, Fiction, Indian, Japanese, Pakistani, South Asian

Even though it's only April (and the book doesn't even hit stands until next month), I'm announcing with absolute certainty that Burnt Shadows gets my unwavering vote as THE Book of the Year. I'll only be too happy to eat my words because that can only mean...

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford

08 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Fiction, Hapa/Mixed-race, Japanese American

When he deliberately decides he is his own man at age 13, Chinese American Henry Lee pledges to wait forever for Japanese American Keiko Okabe, who is one of the 120,000 innocent Americans of Japanese ancestry imprisoned during World War II. Beyond U.S. borders, war...

Japanese American Resettlement through the Lens: Hikaru Carl Iwasaki and the WRA’s Photographic Section, 1943-1945 by Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, photographs by Hikaru Carl Iwasaki, foreword by Norman Y. Mineta [in Bloomsbury Review]

08 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Japanese American, Nonfiction, Repost

Amazingly, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), managed to generate some 17,000 photos of Americans of Japanese ancestry who spent the majority of the duration of World War II in prison camps for little more than looking like the enemy. Of these photos, Hirabayashi looks at the...

Miles from Nowhere by Nami Mun [in Bloomsbury Review]

07 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean American, Repost

Nami Mun’s debut is the disturbing but ultimately hopeful story of runaway Joon, a Korean American teenager whose father abandons the family, whose mother loses her sanity, who must somehow navigate homelessness, drug addiction, and sexual abuse to survive the unprotected streets of 1980s New...

Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology edited by Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow, and Jerry Ma [in Bloomsbury Review]

06 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Pan-Asian Pacific American, Repost, Young Adult Readers

The SI boys gather some of the top names in Asian American pop culture to present a unique anthology of the Asian American experience – complete with masked crusaders, caped champions, and even everyday heroes. Together, they’re making our ever-morphing, multi-culti American future a safer,...

A Drifting Life by Tatsumi Yoshihiro, edited and designed by Adrian Tomine, translated by Taro Nettleton [in Bloomsbury Review]

06 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Translation

This 850-plus page autobiographical epic is truly a portrait of an artist as a young man, done manga style. A child of 10 in 1945 post-war Japan, Hiroshi – Tatsumi’s pseudonymous stand-in – makes manga obsessively. His regularly winning contest submissions soon bring him acclaim,...

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li [in Bloomsbury Review]

06 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, Chinese, Chinese American, Fiction, Repost

Full disclosure: this is one of the most heartbreaking books you’ll probably ever read. But read it you should. A young woman – a political victim of post-Mao China – is about to die. While her voice remains missing throughout the novel, the many residents of...

The Color of Earth and The Color of Water by Kim Dong Hwa, translated by Lauren Na [in Bloomsbury Review]

02 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Korean, Repost, Translation

The first two books in a trilogy by manhwa (Korean graphic novel) master Kim introduce English readers to two generations of strong women – a beautiful widowed mother and her blossoming teenage daughter – intimately sharing their lives in early-20th century Korea. While the mother, who runs...

Everything Asian: A Novel by Sung J. Woo [in Bloomsbury Review]

26 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean American, Repost

Loosely woven together from revealing vignettes about the interconnected characters that share 12-year-old protagonist Dae Joon Kim's world, Sung Woo's debut novel is a well-measured, carefully laid out storycloth filled with tenderness and great warmth. After five years of separation, Dae Joon (soon to be David), his sister...

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