Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Story Through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate by Amitava Kumar [in AsianWeek]
Amitava Kumar, a Hindu Indian writer based in the United States, marries a Pakistani Muslim in 1999 when India and Pakistan are at war: “I felt good about...
“And this is how I remember it,” Chun Yu opens her memoir, written in narrative poetry. While her language is spare, her simple words paint evocative pictures of growing up. Stories of her separated...
A beautifully rendered, haunting autobiographical story about a young boy coming of age during China’s Cultural Revolution, a time marked with incomprehensible, dangerous, chaotic change. Absolutely breathtaking.
Review: <a href="http://bookdragonreviews.wordpress.com/files/2009/07/asianweek-2005-02-25-new-and-notable.pdf"...
Novelist and essayist (and frequent New York Review of Books contributor) Mishra adds to what seems to be a growing hybrid genre of memoir infused with history, philosophy, and politics. What begins...
The collected private writings of film and cultural historian Donald Richie, who is perhaps best known as Japan’s pre-eminent 20th-century American expat. Included in the multiple pages devoted to his almost-six-decade love affair with...
The final installation in Mehta’s 11-title series, Continents of Exile, explores his father’s love affair with another woman, documented through their love letters – the eponymous Red Letters. Written without judgment following the deaths...
An intimate memoir about a three-decade relationship between the Dalai Lama and the author Chan that begins with high-pitched giggles over Chan’s Fu Manchu-style mustache and ends with the gift of a...
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...
Bombay plays the starring role in this entertaining (at times disturbing) epic memoir by a South Asian American writer who returns to the world’s largest city – now called Mumbai – with his London-raised...
A powerful collection of prose and poetry by a talented not-yet-30 Korean American writer, named the poet laureate of Queens, New York. In quick snapshots made of words, Park captures...
An engaging memoir by the adopted son of a famed Vietnamese doctor and spiritual master. Growing up in a country devastated by war, the mischievous son eventually learns...
A down-to-earth account of one of the most inspiring women of our times. The memoir that world-renowned activist Yuri Kochiyama began to write at the age of 77 for her family, is...
While the premise of a young girl’s diary about surviving war in contemporary Iraq is promising – if not necessary in order to put an innocent human face to the so-called ‘war on terrorism’...
It starts out interestingly – although predictably – enough with a Chinese great-grandmother whose Gold Mountain husband returns with great riches, a grandmother who marries down but is saved from the Cultural Revolution by...
An anthology of writings from a vast, diasporic group of women of Filipino descent, comprised mostly of new pieces from established authors and new voices.
Review:
Part memoir, part activist handbook, part medical advice column, Hayashi who is the founder of the National Asian Women’s Health Organization, "breaks the silence” of her own history, debunks the myth of...
There are no silent, subservient types in this newest anthology of fiction, poetry, essays, and art that skewers stereotypes of Asian Pacific Americans. Also includes a section devoted to cringe-inducing media quotes (remember <a...
With a name taken from each part of her life – Jane from her adoptive family, Jeong from her birthname, Trenka from her marriage – Trenka writes what just might be the...
As the British-born daughter of a writer of Sufi fables, Shah heard endless mystical tales of the family's ancestral homeland of Afghanistan. At 21, Shah goes in search of those roots, eventually becoming a...
Hong Kingston’s much awaited new book begins with the calamitous fires in the Oakland-Berkeley hills of October 1991 that strike as she is driving home from her father’s funeral –...