Since we had SNOW yesterday in DC, I guess we still have some leftover winter. Brrrr ...
I've been doing an annual New & Notable roundup of APA titles for The Bloomsbury Review for more than a few years now. This year's installment is running a little later than usual. I know you can't see it here, but the roundup is referenced...
Sharing Humanity: A Talk with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni about Her Latest Novel, One Amazing Thing Over the last decades, tragedies – both human-made and those wrought by an ever-angry Mother Nature – seem to be coming at humankind with fast and furious regularity. The latest oil...
Five years ago, Taipei-born Malaysian British Tash Aw landed in the media spotlight with The Harmony Silk Factory, complete with public speculations about an allegedly enormous debut advance. Decorated with multiple important prizes, including Commonwealth and Whitbread first novel awards, Aw’s Factory earned him both...
When the moon fails to rise one night – and continues to stay away – many moons are manufactured so everyone can have one of their own. But only one boy carefully nurtures his moon which beams with the boy’s unwavering love, until eventually, the...
City-girl Claire reluctantly moves to the country, where her parents open an all-organic bakery. During her first summer in the country, she saves her kidnapped mother with the help of her new best friend Jet. When the school year begins, she helps expose toxic dumping...
Amazingly, the War Relocation Authority (WRA), managed to generate some 17,000 photos of Americans of Japanese ancestry who spent the majority of the duration of World War II in prison camps for little more than looking like the enemy. Of these photos, Hirabayashi looks at the...
Nami Mun’s debut is the disturbing but ultimately hopeful story of runaway Joon, a Korean American teenager whose father abandons the family, whose mother loses her sanity, who must somehow navigate homelessness, drug addiction, and sexual abuse to survive the unprotected streets of 1980s New...
Four days after 9/11, a man wearing a turban shows up on Samar’s doorstep – and turns out to be her uncle. After years of estrangement, he’s determined to reunite the fractured family – and in the process teach Sam about her Sikh American heritage....
The SI boys gather some of the top names in Asian American pop culture to present a unique anthology of the Asian American experience – complete with masked crusaders, caped champions, and even everyday heroes. Together, they’re making our ever-morphing, multi-culti American future a safer,...
This 850-plus page autobiographical epic is truly a portrait of an artist as a young man, done manga style. A child of 10 in 1945 post-war Japan, Hiroshi – Tatsumi’s pseudonymous stand-in – makes manga obsessively. His regularly winning contest submissions soon bring him acclaim,...
Full disclosure: this is one of the most heartbreaking books you’ll probably ever read. But read it you should. A young woman – a political victim of post-Mao China – is about to die. While her voice remains missing throughout the novel, the many residents of...
An informative look – underscored with lively photographs – at the history and future of Mount Everest, a sacred place for the locals, overtaken by adventurous tourism, and currently suffering the high price of so-called modern progress. Review: "In Celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month:...
The planting and harvesting of the core food product of Bali – rice – is an exercise in careful natural balance by the local farmers. But when the government gets involved and introduces genetically modified hybrid rice and chemical fertilizers, the perfect cycle breaks and...
The first two books in a trilogy by manhwa (Korean graphic novel) master Kim introduce English readers to two generations of strong women – a beautiful widowed mother and her blossoming teenage daughter – intimately sharing their lives in early-20th century Korea. While the mother, who runs...
Loosely woven together from revealing vignettes about the interconnected characters that share 12-year-old protagonist Dae Joon Kim's world, Sung Woo's debut novel is a well-measured, carefully laid out storycloth filled with tenderness and great warmth. After five years of separation, Dae Joon (soon to be David), his sister...
At 12, Love Liu lives with his architect parents in the village of Ürümchi in the Xinjiang region of northeast China. Growing up during the Cultural Revolution means he is surrounded by discontent and fear – his parents, his friends, their parents must always be diligently...
Spunky and independent Minli can't bear to see her parents leading such harsh lives, especially her mother who is so discontented with the family's poverty that she can't even enjoy the glorious stories Minli's father regularly tells her. Minli is determined to change her family's...
While Grandmom has had only two houses in her 65 years – and 40 years to make her current house "homegrown" – a little 8-year-old girl already has lived in three. Now that she's made five best friends and finally put her bookshelf in alphabetical order,...
Frank and Ellie Benton have had the unthinkable happen to them: their precious 7-year-old son has died of a sudden illness. Even while Ellie is wracked with guilt, Frank blames her for what he believes was her negligence in not taking him to the hospital quickly...
