Historical Archives - Page 7 of 50

Disquiet by Zülfü Livaneli, translated by Brendan Freely [in Shelf Awareness]

08 Jul, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Repost, Translation, Turkish

Former UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Zülfü Livaneli's startling Disquiet requires multi-layered engagement: to appreciate it as a penetrating novel about a Turkish family confronting murder and to acknowledge it as intense sociopolitical testimony of contemporary, too-little-known, ISIL-led (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) genocide of the...

Battles in the Desert by José Emilio Pacheco, translated by Katherine Silver, afterword by Fernanda Melchor [in Shelf Awareness]

05 Jul, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Latin American, Mexican, Repost, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Mexican poet, writer, and essayist José Emilio Pacheco's novella Battles in the Desert returns in a glorious 40th-anniversary edition, re-translated by Katherine Silver from her own decades-old original. Award-winning author Fernanda Melchor appends an illuminating afterword that contextualizes the coming-of-age classic in the Mexican canon. Carlos, still...

The Legend of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor [in Shelf Awareness]

04 Jul, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Chinese American, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Middle Grade Readers, Repost, Singaporean American

The year is 1885 and Mei and her father, Ah Hao, work in a Sierra Nevada logging camp in this mesmerizing middle-grade debut by author/illustrator Shing Yin Khor (The American Dream?). The first few pages of Khor's clever graphic novel delineates underlying racial disparities: "Every night,...

Asadora! (vol. 2) by Naoki Urasawa, translated by John Werry [in Booklist]

02 Jul, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese, Repost, Translation, Young Adult Readers

And so the intriguing layers – always characteristic of auteur Naoki Urasawa’s series – begin to multiply in volume 2 of his latest Stateside import, brought into English by frequent manga translator John Werry (who lent his talents to the first volume, and the continuity...

The Bombay Prince [A Mystery of 1920s India Book 3] by Sujata Massey [in Shelf Awareness]

29 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Indian, Indian American, Repost, South Asian, South Asian American

Sujata Massey introduced feisty Perveen Mistry, India's first female solicitor, in the Agatha Award-winning The Widows of Malabar Hill in 2018. In the meticulously researched and entertainingly executed The Bombay Prince, Massey continues to mine details from the lives of two groundbreaking Indian women – Cornelia Sorabji and...

China Room by Sunjeev Sahota [in Shelf Awareness]

17 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, British, British Asian, Fiction, Indian, Repost, South Asian

China Room, the outstanding third novel by Sunjeev Sahota, ends with a black-and-white image of an older woman holding a crying infant. That photo – displayed in a dining room in China Room – is the dual narrative's pivotal connector: a "great-grandmother ...

We Two Alone: Stories by Jack Wang [in Shelf Awareness]

16 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Canadian, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Chinese American, Fiction, Repost, Short Stories

*STARRED REVIEW The Chinese diaspora is dispersed across continents and decades in Jack Wang's magnificent debut, We Two Alone (selected as one of the CBC's 2020 Best Canadian Fiction and Quill & Quire's 2020 Books of the Year). Wang's seven-story collection traverses North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, pausing...

We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration by Frank Abe and Tamiko Nimura, illustrated by Ross Ishikawa and Matt Sasaki [in Booklist]

15 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Japanese American, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

Three months after the Pearl Harbor bombings, rumors of racist mass eviction became reality when President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, unlawfully condemning 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps across the western U.S. Following political leaders spouting conspiracy...

Hard Like Water by Yan Lianke, translated by Carlos Rojas [in Booklist]

10 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese, Fiction, Repost, Translation

In China, notes Yan Lianke’s Anglophone enabler-of-choice Carlos Rojas, there exists “a literary subgenre known as ‘revolution plus love,’ which was popular ...

Author Interview: Silvia Moreno-Garcia [in Shelf Awareness]

20 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Author Interview/Profile, Canadian, Fiction, Latin American, Mexican, Repost

Silvia Moreno-Garcia: On Publishing, Racism, and a "Real Horror Story" Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a literary chameleon, successfully writing across genres, including speculative short fiction (This Strange Way of Dying), historical fantasy (The Beautiful Ones), magical realism (Gods of Jade and Snow) and horror (Mexican Gothic). She's also edited several anthologies, is the publisher of micro-indie...

Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia [in Shelf Awareness]

19 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Canadian, Fiction, Latin American, Mexican, Repost

Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Mexican Gothic) opens Velvet Was the Night with an epigraph quoting a June 1971 U.S. Department of State telegram about the Hawks, a murderous Mexican government-trained "shock group" supported by the CIA. She ends with this final sentence in her afterword: "My novel is noir,...

Asian American #OwnVoices: Artfully Narrated Middle Grade, YA, and Crossover Audiobooks [in School Library Journal]

17 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Chinese American, Fiction, Filipina/o American, Hapa/Mixed-race, Indian American, Iranian American, Japanese American, Korean American, Lists, Memoir, Middle Grade Readers, Nonfiction, Pakistani American, Persian American, Repost, South Asian American, Southeast Asian American, Vietnamese American, Young Adult Readers

Welcome to Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Month. The year remains somber, as the APA community combats dramatically increasing anti-Asian violence around the country and continues to mourn the eight people, including six women of Asian descent, killed in a Georgia mass shooting. Despite a U.S....

Catch the Rabbit by Lana Bastašić [in Booklist]

12 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Bosnian, Eastern European, European, Fiction, Repost, Translation

Once upon a time, two Bosnian girls arrived at kindergarten with paper-doll selfies. Sara’s mother made hers, garbed in pink and glittery. Lejla’s was blank. “[I]t’s not like I wear the same clothes every day,” she insisted, as if already aware that future incarnations –...

Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman [in Shelf Awareness]

11 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Hapa/Mixed-race, Jewish, Latin American, Latina/o/x, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW That the protagonist's name is Francisco Goldberg – an amalgam of maternal Guatemalan immigrant and paternal Jewish parentage – presents an irresistible invitation to explore autobiographical overlaps with award-winning creator Francisco Goldman. The parallels are immediate: both are peripatetic journalist/writers with connections to Boston,...

From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry: The Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement by Paula Yoo [in Shelf Awareness]

10 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Korean American, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

On June 19, 1982, 27-year-old Chinese American Vincent Chin was bludgeoned with a baseball bat by Ronald Ebens and stepson Michael Nitz. The two white men, like too many others, were driven by anti-Asian resentment over Detroit's declining auto industry due to Japanese competition. "It's...

The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin [in Shelf Awareness]

06 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Fiction, Repost

Warning: the number of corpses could actually exceed the page count in Tom Lin's addictively gruesome debut, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu. Set between the Utah Territories and California in the late 1800s, Lin's novel manages to enhance a wild, wild western with Odyssean devotion, magic...

One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924–1965 by Jia Lynn Yang [in Booklist]

04 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Chinese American, Nonfiction, Pan-Asian Pacific American, Repost, Taiwanese American, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Pulitzer Prized NYT editor/journalist Jia Lynn Yang makes history intimately personal: “This book is an attempt to fuse my family’s history to the history of the country that found a place for us ...

Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho [in Booklist]

26 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Hapa/Mixed-race, Korean, Korean American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW “In my lifetime, I’ve had at least three mothers,” Grace M. Cho writes. After surviving the Korean War, Cho’s mother worked as a bar girl at a U.S. naval base during the U.S. occupation of South Korea. In 1971, she married Cho’s father, a...

Here We Are by Graham Swift [in Booklist]

23 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, British, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost

British actor Phil Davis makes his solo narrating debut, his voice controlled and resonant, softened just slightly for the single female among Swift’s elusive trio. Here We Are, the title proclaims, and yet – well, the threesome is more fleeting illusion than solid presence. In 1959...

Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town by Barbara Demick [in Booklist]

15 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, Tibetan

Let’s just agree that Casandra Campbell is not fluent in any Asian languages – which makes her an odd (mis)casting choice for a title set mostly in Tibet, populated by mostly Tibetan characters. That said, lauded journalist Barbara Demick’s extraordinary latest is a book to...

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