A Long Stay in a Distant Land by Chieh Chieng [in AsianWeek]
08 Sep, by in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Fiction, Repost
Here’s an auspicious debut about three generations of the Lum family of Orange County, California, who may or may not be trying to survive a death curse, who have...
Somebody's Daughter
Marie Myung-Ok Lee Finds Her Voice
A stirring collection of portraits of activists, writers, artists and (even!) politicians accompanied by stirring quotes. Mini-bios are available in the back. But where are the APAs among...
The inaugural title of an entertaining new series introduces five 17th-century Chinese young monks, each with special powers, who must save their world from destruction by one of their fellow brethren gone...
Got the publication date confused and held it longer than intended – but can’t let it go without saying this is a grand coming-of-age story. Jazz Gardner travels to India with her family where...
A careful examination of 48 second-generation South Asian Americans whose parents arrived from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal during 1965 and the mid-1980s. Through personal stories and sociological context, Purkayastha explores how this second...
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!
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Breathtaking, heartbreaking account of the women trapped for generations in Pakistan’s pleasure quarter – once beloved, artistically gifted courtesans now reduced to devastating prostitution.
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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.
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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...