PEN/Faulkner finalist Matthew Salesses, a transracial Korean adoptee, again distills his own experiences with race and (e)masculinity for laudable literary inspiration in The Sense of Wonder. His intricate novel spotlights three basketball players at different points of their careers – starting out, at the pinnacle,...
Axie Oh adapts the traditional Korean “Tale of Shim Cheong” as the basis of her latest novel, her first foray into exploring folklore. Her unique version features 16-year-old Mina who, unwilling to watch her adored older brother lose his beloved Shim Cheong, replaces herself as...
Journalist/author Joshua David Stein (Notes from a Young Black Chef) goes back to school in Lunch from Home, a delectable celebration of comfort foods with origins from all over the world that converge in a single classroom. "This story [is] based on the lives of four...
In her fifth adult title, Gabrielle Zevin (Young Jane Young, 2017) impressively interweaves multiple threads that twist and tangle around what is essentially a decades-long love story. Jennifer Kim ciphers most of the narration, deftly distinguishing the main three players, with a brief interlude voiced...
In the short opening paragraph introducing a young man watching his mother approach the LAX curb in her new Prius, debut novelist Ryan Lee Wong manages to pack in generation gaps, climate change, brutal colonialism, and “let[ting] go of that ancestral sh*t sooner or later.” Columbia...
Lio Min's soulful debut novel, Beating Heart Baby, highlights music, art, and the love of family – by birth, yes, but more significantly by circumstance and choice. Their emotive narrative spotlights Filipino American artist Santi and Korean Japanese American musician Suwa, playing out a tumultuous relationship...
Readers familiar with Lyla Lee's exuberant YA debut, I'll Be the One, will be tickled to see that singer/dancer Skye Shin is "topping the charts" in Lee's equally ebullient sophomore YA novel, Flip the Script. Like Skye, Lee's new protagonist, Hana Jin, is a Korean American...
Sa-i-gu (Korean for 4-2-9 as in April 29, 1992) was a defining moment in Korean American history, when 2,300-plus Korean-owned businesses were destroyed in the Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of Rodney King’s brutal arresting officers. Actor John Cho makes his fiction debut with...
*STARRED REVIEW Grace, 21, and Jacob, 25, are Korean Hawaiian on their father’s side (three Cho generations are currently islanders); maternally, they are both South and North Korean, with their closest Jeong relatives in Seoul. College senior Grace lives at home and works at their parents’ Cho’s...
Short-story collections can be uneven, but readers will be consistently impressed by these extraordinary, resonant, and exhilarating debuts by a dozen diverse writers. Afterparties. By Anthony Veasna So. 2021. Ecco. So’s nine electrifying stories magnificently create an interconnected Cambodian American community. So’s death in December 2020 at just...
Soon Wiley's searing debut, When We Fell Apart, deftly reveals in alternating chapters an abruptly truncated love story. Min Ford, a biracial Korean American, is a Samsung cultural specialist who has lived for three years in Seoul. Kim Yu-jin is in her final year at...
*STARRED REVIEW Bill and Suelynn Evans of Conroe, Texas, can’t have kids. Their experience at their wealthy friends’ son’s birthday party inspires a search for a proxy of their own. In this not-too-distant reality, “the smartest men on the planet” are consumed with “makin’ phony kids”...
Short-story collections can be uneven, but readers will be consistently impressed by these extraordinary, resonant, and exhilarating debuts by a dozen diverse writers. Afterparties. By Anthony Veasna So. 2021. Ecco. So’s nine electrifying stories magnificently create an interconnected Cambodian American community. The most autobiographical is “Human Development,” in...
*STARRED REVIEW Familiar joy is immediate as one reenters Don Lee’s signature worlds of brilliant resonance and quiet depth. In his first short story collection since his lauded Yellow debut, Lee again questions identity, unlikely relationships, and fleeting connections. “Truth was a collection of falsehoods,” Lee’s filmmaker...
June Hur's self-described "obsessing over books about Joseon Korea" has made her a critically acclaimed author of historical Korean fiction. She follows The Silence of Bones and The Forest of Stolen Girls with another riveting thriller, The Red Palace, which transports readers to 1758 Hanyang (now Seoul), when murder...
Since Hara Wilson and Choi Yujun didn't quite get their happily-ever-after in Heart & Seoul, author Jen Frederick – a transracial Korean adoptee – returns with its addictive sequel, Seoulmates. In the first book, Korea-born, Iowa-raised adoptee Hara's loss of her estranged father prompted a...
*STARRED REVIEW A multi-generational family home of horrors looms throughout James Han Mattson’s (The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves) spellbinding latest. Ever-versatile narrator JD Jackson chills and thrills, underscoring the slyly literary, intensifying the social commentary, enhancing the utterly gory. John Forrester began his house of frights...
*STARRED REVIEW Covering most of the 20th century across the Korean peninsula, Juhea Kim’s debut novel wondrously reveals broken families and surprising alliances created by uncontrollable circumstances. Kim links multiple narrative prongs, effortlessly navigating overlaps and disconnects. Korea remains under Japan’s ruthless occupation in 1917, which lasts...
For audiences in search of a quick slender read, Eugene Lim's surreally quirky Search History is not it. The pre-prologue to the prologue opens as "A Warning to the Reader" with various cautions and enlightenments; 152 dense pages later, gratification awaits. The story features a late Korean...
With a Chinese immigrant father and a white mother, Willa Chen examines her new adulthood as an untethered millennial. “If you’re undercared for, but essentially fine, what do you do with all that hurt, the kind that runs through your tendons and tugs on your...
