Once Removed by Mako Yoshikawa [in AsianWeek]
27 Jun, by in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese American, Repost
In alternating voices, this lyrical novel captures the relationship between two stepsisters – one a Japanese American, the other a blond Jewish-Catholic – who are so different and yet so alike, proving that some...
Debut collection of breathtaking, breathless stories by a half-Japanese, half-Irish American writer who seems to be searching for meaning in the spaces between war and peace, between being Japanese and becoming American,...
For two years before she left Iran, Nafisi, a resigned university professor, spent almost every Thursday morning with seven of her favorite former female students, discussing Western classics in a...
Here's the book that inspired both the Japanese cult film, Ringu, and the recent American remake, The Ring. With its bright pink and white cover, it’s a major eye-catcher. Start reading and it’s so creepy, your...
A young woman returns to her home in India after a seven-year absence and has a difficult time telling her family about her non-Indian fiancé. The story is an otherwise entertaining light read about...
A middle-aged yakuza who probably should have been “The Boss” but has stalled somewhere tries to figure out how to get out of the fray and quietly manipulate his way to the top.
Review: 
First trade paperback edition of the harrowing memoir of a 6-year-old child who becomes separated from her family in the last days of World War II in Okinawa,...
An especially timely, highly entertaining look – “I-ran is a sentence, Iran is a country” – at life in Southern California as an Iranian immigrant. Dumas mixes humorous misadventures with chilling memories...
A testosterone-driven adventure about a journalist with a military past who has a heyday tracking down drug smugglers, guerrillas, mobsters, and nuclear missiles.
Review: 
Introduced in Chang’s Over the Shoulder, Korean American Allen Choice – a licensed bodyguard but not yet a private investigator – returns in this second installment to figure out the facts about the sudden, suspicious death...
Yes, that B.D. Wong of small and large screen fame. Following Foo is a heartbreaking, loving, hope-filled ride to parenthood for Wong and his partner who have twins with the help of a surrogate...
Unique collection of classical Chinese poetry that reveals the Chinese influences on American poetry, with translations by poets themselves, including such near-mythic figures as William Carlos Williams and...
Special issue of a notable academic journal that focuses on the growing numbers of adoptions by Westerners of children from around the world.
Review: 
Already a bestseller in France, where it was first published, Satrapi’s achievement is capturing her childhood in spare comic book images that speak utter volumes. Satrapi, whose great grandfather was a Persian emperor, recalls her life...
Stunningly rendered, intimate look at today’s Vietnam, its country, its people, its beliefs, its hopes – a Vietnam no longer associated with war.
Review: 
A focus on Asian American women in politics and dedicated to the late Patsy Mink, who was the first APA woman elected to Congress, famous for helping to author Title IX of...
Vicious, harrowing, nightmare of a short novel about a 17-year-old girl arrested and imprisoned for her brother’s revolutionary activities during the fundamentalist takeover of Iran. Based on the lives of real women who survived such horrific,...
A slim, must-read collection of powerful essays by the author of the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things that questions everything from nuclear power, the so-called war against terror, and the new imperialism....
A brand new rendition of the 300 B.C.E epic poem – one of South Asia’s most important literary texts – about the perfect man, Rama, and the perfect woman, Sita, his wife.
Review: 
A collection of 13 essays that examine the Asian Pacific American role in the latest frontier – cyberspace – from “Oriental” influences (with all the cringe-inducing-‘isms’ that word implies) to machine-like Asian laborers to the yellowfacing...