Simple Vietnamese for You by Nguyen Thanh Tri [in AsianWeek]
Complete with rudimentary drawings of tongue positions for proper pronunciation, this guide has quite the collection of translated sentences: “These models do have their sexually flaming excited bodies.” I’ll stick with the “Please, give...
Gorgeous pages with ingredient lists so short that you might actually start believing that “simple” is not a misnomer!
Review:
Breathtaking, heartbreaking account of the women trapped for generations in Pakistan’s pleasure quarter – once beloved, artistically gifted courtesans now reduced to devastating prostitution.
Review:
Two novellas about women on the verge of change: in Hardboiled, a woman hiking in remote mountains realizes it’s the anniversary of her ex-lover’s death and overnights with a ghost,...
Nineteen years after her twin’s unsolved disappearance, Mara Dunn finds her sister’s camera in a junk sale. Its final roll of film – of rare orchids – offers a definitive path of clues. With...
Here the connecting thread is that of place: a changing, bustling Bangalore at the core of fabulous stories about a man who falls in love too late with the wrong woman, an old man...
This one is just delicious – and delightfully plotted as to how it plays with time and place and people. The beginning: a man, a woman,...
This slim volume of short stories by Nobel Prize Winner Gao, does not offer linear tales with pithy morals. Instead, it’s an elliptical collection...
A pseudonymously penned mystery thriller from the chronicler of the early Filipino American experience, this "lost" work ironically follows the lives of three non-Filipinos. Nevertheless, Hau and Anderson establish the work as...
Innocence lost: 17-year-old Ami is both schoolgirl and prostitute, pregnant by her mentally challenged older brother, brutally gang raped by a rock star and his groupies, but capable of restoring the dormant virility of...
If this 120-page novel rife with sex and violence were any longer, reading it would be unbearable. That it won Japan’s highest literary honor, the Akutagawa Prize, for its then 20-year-old author,...
All in the Name of Love in Xinran’s ‘Sky Burial’
Here’s the story: two lovers, marriage, and cruel separation by war shortly thereafter. The husband dies mysteriously, but the wife remains skeptical and embarks on...
Uh-oh! Every time this energetic little girl is ready to go out, the weather changes, but nothing deters her delightful determination to have a great day.
Review:
Sweet Briar Skunk remembers how she felt when the other animals were not very welcoming on her first day of school. So at camp, she comes to the...
A delighful underwater pop-up journey with Samantha Squid as she introduces all her favorite sea friends.
Review:
The first two installments of a new trilogy from YA master Yep. Tiger’s Apprentice opens with the untimely death of Mistress Lee, the current Guardian of the mysterious rose which holds the future hope...
I can only hope that the majority of APA adolescent boys are nothing like Nick Park – the lone Asian American in a Connecticut suburb, convinced that his Korean American-ness is what...
Somehow missed this title earlier, even as it won the 2004 Paul Zindel First Novel Award. While the story is familiar – a young girl moves from a loving home filled with extended family...
A varied collection of elliptical poems from Tsering, possibly the only Tibetan American writer publishing regularly. Her words, her images, her memories seem to weave together to reinvent and reconstruct...
A beautifully produced collection of intertwined poems that have more margin than print – although it’s the sparseness, that which is not written, that lingers.
Review: