Surely, I have never been part of a more raucous audience than when I saw David Henry Hwang's latest play, Yellow Face, at New York's Public Theater in December 2007. The man at the end of the row in front of us LITERALLY FELL OUT...
On Old-Timers, Boxing, and Lots of Sex (mostly off the page ...
If you haven't heard of Randy Pausch and experienced his delightful, heartbreaking, inspiring Last Lecture, surely you must: Click here for a comprehensive summary page created by Carnegie Mellon University where he was a professor before he passed away on July 25, 2008 of pancreatic...
The remarkable story begun in The New Sun continues in this second volume of Taro Yashima's graphic memoir, a strikingly simple combination of pictures and brief text that capture a man's journey away from his homeland. Long out of print since its 1947 first printing, Horizon...
What an amazing, unique, and LUCKY find! First published in 1943 by one of the oldest U.S. publishers, Henry Holt and Company, and in spite of excellent reviews plus a multi-year marketing campaign by both publisher and an early publicist who worked to get the...
Prominently noted on the cover as "The first Arab novel to confront the Holocaust" and banned in the author's native Algeria, The German Mujahid is also based on a true story, making it an even more disturbing, striking read. To add to its authenticity, the novel...
Apparently the big book controversy this week (besides the Wal-Mart $10 vs. Amazon $9 pre-order pricing war) is David Small's 2009 National Book Award nomination in the Young People's Literature category for his graphic memoir, Stitches. YA or not YA, that is the question ...
Forty-three (yes, 43!) hours is a major commitment to a single book. And in spite of the most eye-rolling, not-so-nicely-talking back to a continuously babbling (for 43 hours, 3 minutes to be exact!) iPod that I have ever done, I will actually admit that Shantaram is...
As this volume is currently the last one available in English, I DID try and save and savor it ...
If you see a book cover with the name Dai Sijie on it, read the book. Dai's delightful 2001 debut, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, about two young boys who discover a love for literature while sequestered in a re-education camp during Mao's Cultural Revolution,...
In her reader's guide at book's end, Naseem Rakha explains how in 1996 she was assigned to cover Oregon's first excecution in over three decades. Once finished with the assignment, she continued to ask questions and "by far the most compelling [stories] were those told...
Not only will you be unable to put this down, you'll have to be careful to remember to breathe while reading this unforgettable debut novel written entirely in free verse. By age 10, Matt Pin has already had a harrowing life as a child of...
Lac Su is a survivor of things so harrowing that just recounting some of those experiences, even from the distance of a keyboard tapping out a review of his memoir, I Love Yous Are for White People, makes the heart wince. As a 5-year-old immigrant to...
When he deliberately decides he is his own man at age 13, Chinese American Henry Lee pledges to wait forever for Japanese American Keiko Okabe, who is one of the 120,000 innocent Americans of Japanese ancestry imprisoned during World War II. Beyond U.S. borders, war...
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...
The inaugural post for a historic inaugural year! While finding out so much more about our first African American president, you can also discover his Asian Pacific American cultural heritage, as well. He was born in Hawai’i, his father-figure ages 4-6 was an Indonesian man, Lolo...
What can I say? This debut collection is a gift. In eight intertwined stories using spare, perfectly measured language, hapa Pakistani American Daniyal Mueenuddin captures the lives of the haves and have-nots – money, position, power – with both precision and grace. Each of the collection's characters...
In 1979, 9-year-old Suleiman already lives a fractured existence in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, controlled by Qaddafi and the ever-present threat of his secret police. While his father is often away on some unknown business, young Suleiman is left behind to take care of...
Already an established nonfiction writer and poet, David Mura presents his debut novel, about a not-so-young Japanese American self-proclaimed itinerant historian who must delve into his own family's past – populated by both a...
With amazingly effective simplicity, artist Guy Delisle takes you to Burma through an ex-pat’s perspective. He arrives with his wife, a Médecins San Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) aid worker, shortly after the devastating...
