My Name is Yoon by Helen Recorvits, illustrated by Gabi Swiatkowska [in AsianWeek]
A playfully clever, subversive story with fabulously whimsical pictures about a little Korean girl who doesn’t like her name spelled out in English letters: “Lines. Circles. Each standing alone,” she...
The third installment in the
In order to sign up for the dancing class at the local recreation center – so it can get government funding – Fiona Cheng has to indicate her race. Being Scottish from...
Having survived the horrors of war in her native Laos and 10 long years of living in a cramped, filthy, and dangerous refugee camp in Thailand, Mai Yang and her grandmother are finally allowed...
Originally banned in China, To Live was the basis for the 1994 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize winner of the same name, directed by grandmaster Zhang Yimou. A surprisingly slim volume, To Live tells...
An entertaining ghost story with a twist about a recently divorced television script writer who takes to visiting his parents … except they died tragically in
an accident decades ago, leaving him an orphan from childhood. The...
A striking, original collection of multi-layered short stories about life caught between the old and modern, between expectations and hopes, between dreams and reality. The opening story, “Gopal’s Kitchen,” is especially poignant about a...
The long-awaited debut novel by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, begins in 1968 with newlyweds-by-arrangement Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli living in Cambridge, Mass. They name their first child Gogol,...
In another British import of a debut novel, Manicka draws from her own history to create a family saga of four generations and 70 years. At the family’s core is its matriarch, Lakshmi, who...
Hong Kingston’s much awaited new book begins with the calamitous fires in the Oakland-Berkeley hills of October 1991 that strike as she is driving home from her father’s funeral –...
A runaway bestseller in its native Britain and quickly climbing the charts on this side of the pond, Ali’s assured debut novel follows the life of Bangladeshi-born Nazneen, who arrives at age 18 in...
One of the three newest additions to the Girls of Many Lands series [click
A touching story about an immigrant Muslim family of five from Egypt, which shows details from their everyday lives. The book is especially relevant now, in order to expose young readers to...
Her Bum Is on Fire: Jessica Hagedorn debuts with her latest novel
After years of chatting on the phone and sending various e-mails back and forth, I finally got the chance to meet writer extraordinaire...
The woman who inspired the Taj Mahal had all but been lost to history until Sundaresan recreated her in her historical novel The Twentieth Wife, released earlier this year in paperback. Sundaresan...
The follow-up to the award-winning A Bridge Between Us, Shigekuni's newest novel tells the haunting story of Lily Soto, a young Japanese American woman who appears to have the perfect life with her adoring...
The book, apparently "based 80-90 percent on real stories," is admittedly over-the-top in a Miss Saigon sort of way. But the Donna/Mai story is everything Hollywood is searching for – so no...
Koul captures the lives of four generations of women in her native Kashmir, a tiny country caught between India and Pakistan since the Partition of 1947, the year of her birth. She weaves a...
The re-release of the 10-million copy-strong bestselling epic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, opens with a brand-new introduction by the author. First published in 1991, Chang chronicles the lives of her concubine...
A poignant, lovely bilingual tale about a little girl who visits her ancestral home in Vietnam and realizes that she can be both Vietnamese and American, with a home here...