The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri [in AsianWeek]
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...
What might be considered a companion collection to
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...
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...
Born Hiranyagabha Chakraborti in 1857 during the time of the Indian Mutiny (when Indians rebelled against the ruling British) on the same day of his father’s death, Hiran (as he comes to be called)...
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...
Living in the Space of 'In-Between': In any language, author Yoko Tawada is easily understood
If I wanted to make my mother truly proud, I would finally complete either of the...
Gathering History for the Future: A Profile of Curator & Historian Franklin Odo
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...
Make sure you get this one into your library – it's the very first collection of historical writings by and about APA women. It's about rethinking our collective past as...
"It is not the accuracy of the story that concerns us," the author writes in the title's opening poem. "But who gets to tell it." Dhompa captures her fractured self...
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...
Don’t know how this one fell through the cracks as I devoured it months ago and it was one of my favorites this whole year –...
A fabulous collection of prose and poetry from a new generation of Korean American authors. Grouped into three sets of pairings – arrival/return, dwelling/crossing, descent/flight, all with multiple layers of meaning –...
A young woman returns to her home in India after a seven-year absence and has a difficult time telling her family about her non-Indian fiancé. The story is an otherwise entertaining light read about...
An especially timely, highly entertaining look – “I-ran is a sentence, Iran is a country” – at life in Southern California as an Iranian immigrant. Dumas mixes humorous misadventures with chilling memories...
A collection of 13 essays that examine the Asian Pacific American role in the latest frontier – cyberspace – from “Oriental” influences (with all the cringe-inducing-‘isms’ that word implies) to machine-like Asian laborers to the yellowfacing...
A history of a changing Filipino population in and around Seattle, bookended by both World Wars.
Review: