Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee [in Bloomsbury Review]
01 Nov, by in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean American, Repost
As the daughter of struggling Korean immigrants, Casey Han has created a persona defined by her expensive tastes, her magna cum laude Princeton degree, and a wealthy family friend who is always there to lend a...
As elliptical as Hur’s debut novel is, it’s also incredibly dense, weighed down by the trials and tribulations of a lost generation of Korean American Manhattanites whose teenage lives revolve around the clubs and restaurants of...
A deserved Booker 2007 shortlister, Hamid’s slim, powerful title is a deconstruction of the failure of the American Dream for those who look like the enemy. Changez is a young, accomplished Pakistani transplant with a Princeton...
Something magical happens when prize-winning novelist Edwidge Danticat strings words together. From the most trivial details to breathtaking moments of enormous gravity, Danticat uses words as charms that gently beckon readers into her world and make...
Alas, summer's over, but that doesn't mean the fun reads have to be thrown aside for more serious fare. If anything, some depth mixed with light fun might make for the ideal transitional book.
A Concise Chinese-English...
"Yes. That is exactly what it is. A book is a device to ignite the imagination,'" says the fictional Queen Elizabeth II when her footman informs her that her reading choice might have been an explosive...
At the heart of M.G. Vassanji's sixth novel, The Assassin's Song, is an exercise in perspective. Definitions of right and wrong, truth and deception, the chosen and outcast – especially in matters having to do with...
Already a runaway bestseller in Vietnam, this diary will break your heart – but offer you hope that in the worst of times, we human beings can be miraculously humane.
As a young doctor working for communist...
From the artist who brought you the inventively creepy 
I so love 
Here’s an inventive new manga series, this one by a woman. It's set in the future when humans have all but destroyed planet Earth. Those who have survived the collapse have created the era of...
While teenage readers will surely enjoy this manga too, adults can learn a little something about teenage dynamics. Shizuka Shiroyama, a thoughtful, timid young girl, suffers from the mysterious “Translucent Syndrome,” which means she cyclically starts...
This is a heavy tome, but it’s one of those impressive, erudite, must-have titles for anyone interested in Asian literature or literature in general. The Japanese were writing novels centuries before Don Quixote even chased his...
Forget pastoral countryside and quaint village life – this is post-Tiananmen China in which money rules and reinvention is the answer to survival in a new society defined by unleashed capitalism and greed. Six stories capture...
Su Qi, a sensitive Chinese Malaysian youth, comes of age in the magical jungles of Borneo, shaped by the cruelty he witnesses at the hands of his abusive father and his loving but withdrawn mother. He...
If I were to make my mother the happiest mother in the world, I’d finish at least one of my PhDs by writing that elusive dissertation on Yoko Tawada and her fantastical, enigmatic, revisionist, ambiguous short...
The latest from one of Japan’s leading novelists is another signature piece in which the unexpected should be anticipated. It’s just before midnight and teenaged Mari reads a thick, unnamed book in a well-lit Denny’s in...
“Beat” Takeshi Kitano, most widely known as an acclaimed filmmaker, is indeed a Renaissance man. Besides making films, he’s an actor, comedian, major TV personality, poet, painter, and novelist – and most likely more. While he...