Naming Maya by Uma Krishnaswami [in AsianWeek]
03 Dec, by in Fiction, Indian, Indian American, Middle Grade Readers, Repost, South Asian, South Asian American
A touching, slim coming-of-age novel about young Maya who travels one summer to Chennai, India, with her mother. Both mother and daughter are still stinging from a year-old divorce. There in the folds of...
Maya Mehra, 30 and still living with her parents, gets kidnapped at LAX where she’s gone to pick up her unknown prospective husband. When she comes to, she is told that she’s...
Devi’s failed suicide attempt sends her back home to her parents, where she refuses to speak but decides to cook. Before she can regain her voice – as she becomes...
First and foremost: This is one of the best books I’ve read this year in spite of the historical improbability laid out at the novel’s end. Ayoshi, a woman artist in 1869 Japan, paints in order...
The first-ever comprehensive anthology in the West of Indian writing, represented in prose, poems, and memoirs by 38 writers from the 1850s to the 1990s.
Review: <a...
An interesting departure for Desai, who turns to Mexico to tell the story of a hapless Boston graduate student who accompanies his ambitious girlfriend abroad. While wandering, he discovers a lost part of his...
Responding with Hope to 9/11: A Talk with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni About Her Latest Novel, Queen of Dreams
Three years after the tragic events of 9/11, 
Calling himself "quite an ordinary man" even as he tops his country's List of Shame, Vikram Lall recounts four decades of his "in-between" life in...
What begins as an arranged marriage between a legendary beauty and a dashing doctor is anything but a happily-ever-after tale. But it is a sweeping love story that will stay...
Incredibly enough, a British novelist has written my own family’s story – on both the Hong and Yi sides. Novel though it may be, here’s proof that my ancestors were beyond crazy. The first...
Based on historical accounts, Ha Jin’s third novel opens with the words of an elderly man who records his memoirs for his American-born grandchildren. He
methodically recounts his experiences as a young “volunteer” Chinese army...
One of the more intriguing, original novels I’ve come across in a long time – although I can’t really tell you what happened because I still haven’t figured it out. Presented in...
From one of the bad-boy editors of 
Belle Lettres for Kids
What lovely serendipity that just as our oldest child started reading in 1999, one of my very favorite writers, 
A fun little interactive book about tricks and treats for the youngest little hands to manipulate and giggle over.
Review: 
Oh, wow!! What a compelling debut novel: Lonely, orphaned Ramchand, cheated out of any inheritance, works in a small sari shop. His quiet existence is challenged by two extremes: the overindulged, hypocritical life of...
Jen’s third novel is a bittersweet examination of the Wongs, a complicated Chinese American family with a father named Carnegie (!), a Caucasian mother called Blondie, two Asian adoptee daughters, and one towheaded birthson....
From the author of the devastating 
An oddly compelling novella about a lonely man who never quite gets the girl – any girl – but is unwilling to give up trying. Indeed, few writers can do isolation quite like Kawabata, the Nobel-Prize-winning...
This new edition of a bestselling classic biographical novel – should be on every student reading list! – includes a new essay, “Reclaiming Polly Bemis,” and discussion questions. <a href="http://www.mccunn.com/"...