Born and raised in a small Pennsylvania town, the only connection 14-year-old Grace has to her Cambodian heritage are her mother and her grandmother. While these three generations of women clearly need and love one another, they are uncertain as to how to truly know each...
'Collateral damage' is such a detached, sanitized phrase for the innocent people who pay the highest price for the tragic folly of war; and surely the youngest and the eldest suffer the greatest. "I want people to know the truth about what happened," Nawuth Keat told...
For someone who has experienced hell, Loung Ung is a bright, welcoming voice filled with inviting laughter. She’s warm: “I just had dinner with my writing group last night. They’re my PenGals. I just love them! I don’t know what I would do without them.” She’s practical:...
Tragically, death and destruction are very much a part of human reality ...
Half the Sky is a remarkable, life-changing book. It should be required reading for all adults (and more mature young adults), but especially for us overprivileged, lucky-solely-by-chance-of-birth citizens of the West. If there is ONE book you read this new year, let it be this...
One Halloween night when Anne Greves is 16, she goes with older friends to a jazz club and falls in love for the first time in her young life. Serey is an older man, already in his 20s, a musician, who has already lived too...
Playwright Catherine (pronounced Ka-treen) Filloux has built her dramatic reputation on giving voice to lost, overlooked souls. In Lemkin's House, Filloux presents the struggle of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish American lawyer whom she refers to as her "historical soulmate," a man who coined the term "genocide"...
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...
Arn Chorn-Pond was just 8 years old when he was torn from his family in 1975 as the Khmer Rouge invaded Cambodia. He survives years of unimaginable atrocities with only rare moments of music to soothe...
Little Sap, a poor country girl, is chosen to become one of the royal court dancers of Cambodia. She travels to France on a royal tour in 1906, where she inspires the legendary French artist Auguste...
The latest in the First Person Fiction series, Goddess tells the story of a young dancer-in-training and her family living in Phnom Penh as the Khmer Rouge take over Cambodia, resulting in...
Beautiful Lotus is unable to hear or speak. Ostracized by the other children, she is lonely and sad. Her parents take her to the local temple where she sees temple dancers for the first...
A young husband is called off to war, leaving his wife behind. The tree spirit assumes the husband’s image and goes to live with the wife. The real husband returns and must seek the...
