The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh [in aMagazine: Inside Asian America]
A startlingly complex novel, The Glass Palace opens with a literal bang, as British cannons thunder over the noise of a busy Burmese marketplace in 1885. A historical work that sweeps over a century...
Thank goodness for reliable standbys:
Let's face it, the media is great at creating and perpetuating stereotypes. Take Asians: inscrutable and mysterious, sly and calculating, from the shuffling house boy to the prostitute with the heart of gold, from Ming the...
This anthology, which includes both short stories and excerpts from larger works, celebrates the diversity of Asian American literature, from the many literary styles to the various ethnic backgrounds, ages...
A great book overall because most of it is told in the actual voices of the very Asian Americans who helped create our history. Takaki's follow-up, A Different...
Dogeaters Run
Jessica Hagedorn still sees her bestselling classic,
Readers will really appreciate the back blurb on Alvin Lu’s first novel, The Hell Screens. Because it’s probably going to be the most coherent page of the book.
Here’s what seems to be the gist...
International Quest: Paisley Rekdal’s Search for Identity
Born to a Chinese mother and a Norwegian father, Paisley Rekdal has traversed the world, in search of her identity,...
The Easiest Thing to Do Is Stop Writing
Having just returned from Italy where he got a little R&R and did some research on his next novel, Chang-rae Lee didn’t even have time to recover...
Kazuo Ishiguro’s latest work, When We Were Orphans, is a remarkable novel of love, loss, and potential redemption. In the same understated, quiet style that worked so well in his...
In Search of Mothers
Joanna Catherine Scott, British by birth, Australian by upbringing, and American by chance, is also Asian by association. She is one of a handful – thus far – of...
As I read Karen Shepard’s debut novel, An Empire of Women, I couldn’t help thinking if the title was some sort of sarcastic joke, if not a blatant mistake, because the utter...
A rare first-person account of an immigrant's journey to America during the period of Chinese Exclusion. The memoir, written with his daughter, covers over a half century of Chin's life from his entry into...
Modern Girls
Growing up in a large, extended family in Hong Kong,
With A Blessing Over Ashes: The Remarkable Odyssey of My Unlikely Brother, Adam Fifield adds a new twist to the currently trendy suffering-child memoir boom (a lá Angela’s Ashes – and really, no disrespect...
In Overdrive: Frances Park’s Sweet Road to Success
What began as a short story has quickly become Frances Park’s breakout novel. When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon...
A Legacy of Survival
What began as a casual lunch in San Francisco with a then-business acquaintance ended in a cathartic literary accomplishment for journalist Elizabeth Kim. After exchanging life stories, agent Patti...
In the title poem of Russell Leong’s 1993 poetry collection, The Country of Dreams and Dust (West End Press), an epic work encompassing the history of the Chinese in America, Leong alludes to what...
A Japanese American man recounts his grandfather’s journey from Japan to America, and back to Japan. He comes to understand his grandfather’s feelings of being torn by a sense of being home in two...