'Sour Heart' author Jenny Zhang illuminates the immigrant's struggles to belong “Lena Dunham is like my fairy godmother,” Jenny Zhang revealed in a recent interview with The Guardian, albeit one who tweets and emails with unsolicited offers of editorial help. In the often capricious world of...
'Reading with Patrick' tells of a teacher's extraordinary journey Pontificating with superlatives only halfway through the calendar year might prove short-sighted, but risking humiliated inaccuracy seems to be a negligible consequence for claiming that Reading with Patrick could be the most affecting book you’ll read this...
*STARRED REVIEW The morning after Mia and daughter Pearl return the rental key in the Richardsons' mailbox, the youngest Richardson, Izzy, sets "little fires everywhere," destroying the family home. Following her magnificent debut, Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng’s spectacular sophomore work again manipulates time...
After spontaneously cutting off eight inches of hair, Wang's never-named narrator returns to her chemistry lab and smashes five beakers. She insists, "Beakers are cheap," yet the personal price is inestimable: the shattered vessels parallel an equal number of portentous changes involving her PhD program,...
While Columbus is credited with discovering the Americas, notable scholars and historians have argued that Chinese explorers traveled around the world in the early 15th century and created a surviving map that shows America on its route. Imagine if those ancient explorers had stayed. The history of Asians...
'The Leavers,' inspired by a real story, confronts transracial adoption “Everyone had stories they told themselves to get through the days,” Deming Guo muses the evening of his 22nd birthday, summing up a lifetime of leaving – and being left – that has defined his short...
Seventh graders Hopper, Eni, and Josh have managed to "get with the program" since Volume 1, but they still haven't learned how not to get stuck in places they shouldn't be. Volume 2 opens with a test of their burgeoning skills, which – failed attempts notwithstanding...
Ever since she was a child, Janie Chang was steeped in family tales she inherited from her parents about the generations that came before. For decades, she remained the family’s repository until, at age 53, she presented the world with her debut novel, Three Souls,...
Beloved novelist Gish Jen (World and Town, 2010) expands on the East-West cultural paradigm she applied to examining art and culture in her previous nonfiction work, Tiger Writing (2013), to see “what it can show us about the world.” As the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants,...
Well holy, moly! How did a dozen years fly by so quickly?! San Francisco indie press Immedium’s 12-part Tales from the Chinese Zodiac, written by founding publisher and author Oliver Chin, comes full circle with a final, rousing cock-a-doodle-dooooo!! Mama and Papa welcome Ray to their flock, earning his name...
"I wanted to write about girls and monsters, which has been a theme of mine from almost the start of my career — girls and giant monsters, and the supernatural," bestselling author Marjorie Liu told The Hollywood Reporter in a 2015 interview. "I wanted to...
In a remote mountain village, the survival of an Akha tribe, one of China’s 55 ethnic minorities, depends on tea. Rigid traditions prohibit Li-yan from keeping her newborn. She saves her daughter by leaving her in a nearby town, wrapped in blankets with a tea...
An ephemeral, atmospheric painting, Elegy, is at the core of Wendy Lee’s third and most ambitious novel (Happy Family, 2008; Across a Green Ocean, 2015). An unknown, 30-year-sojourning Chinese artist is paid a pittance to recreate a missing canvas. A desperate New York gallery owner...
On Secrets and the Long, Long Process Journalist Vanessa Hua spent the last couple of decades filing articles from around the globe – China and Ecuador, Burma and Panama, and beyond – which surely gave her the worldly familiarity that resonates throughout her fiction debut, Deceit...
Warning first: This is NOT NOT NOT for kids. For us old folks, however ...
Talking about families can sometimes be daunting for kids, especially when you can't check off those expected, so-called "traditional" boxes on who's who of your bestest loved ones. Sitting in her classroom discussing "what we thought made our family special," one little girl is not...
*STARRED REVIEW Angela Duckworth (psychology, Univ. of Pennsylvania) grew up hearing, "You know, you're no genius!" from her own father; she didn't even qualify for the gifted and talented program in third grade. In 2013, the MacArthur Foundation overturned her father's judgment, awarding her one of...
When 11-year-old Azalea Morgan and her mother arrive in Paris Junction, Arkansas, in August 1952, her mother barely lasts a few minutes in her gossipy, small-town childhood home before she turns the car around, leaving her daughter behind to help her injured grandmother with her...
Thirty years before Brown v. Board of Education struck down segregation in public schools, a Chinese American family in the Mississippi Delta fought to continue their daughter’s education. On September 15, 1924, Rosedale School’s principal banned nine-and-a-half-year-old, straight-A student Martha Lum and her older sister...
