Library Journal Archives - Page 14 of 17

The Bollywood Bride by Sonali Dev [in Library Journal]

06 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Indian, Indian American, Repost, South Asian, South Asian American

Ria Parker has avoided going home to Chicago for far too long, offering up convenient excuses about her demanding Bollywood career. With her beloved more-brother-than-cousin's impending wedding, Ria finally heads stateside from Mumbai to face the family. For 10 years, she's managed to avoid first-and-only-love Vikram,...

Beasts of No Nation by Uzodinma Iweala [in Library Journal]

03 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Audio, Fiction, Repost

Originally published in 2004, then 23-year-old Uzodinma Iweala’s debut novel – which began as the author's Harvard senior thesis under the direction of Jamaica Kincaid – reappears 11 years later in two additional incarnations: as an acclaimed film directed by Cory Fukunaga and this mesmerizing...

Dear Mr. You by Mary-Louise Parker [in Library Journal]

02 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW This is not your ordinary Hollywood memoir: no script doctor or publicist seems to have embellished or sanitized Tony/Emmy/Obie/Golden Globe-winning actress Mary-Louise Parker's first book. Written as a series of letters to almost three dozen "Mr."s both real and imagined, Parker's work captures past...

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma [in Library Journal]

29 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, African, Audio, Fiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW "My brothers and I became fishermen in January of 1996 after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives," explains nine-year-old Benjamin. With Father's strict daily oversight missing and Mother busy with...

The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende, translated by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson [in Library Journal]

09 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, European, Fiction, Japanese American, Jewish, Latina/o/x, Repost, Translation

Multiple narratives swirl around Alma Belasco, a Polish teenager who escaped the Nazis in 1939 and arrived in San Francisco to share a privileged life with an indulgent aunt and uncle. Now 73, Alma is a favorite resident in a senior facility, devotedly looked after...

The Grownup by Gillian Flynn [in Library Journal]

04 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW While Gillian Flynn’s high-flying Gone Girl hasn't wandered far from bestsellers lists, the wait is on for what she'll publish next. She's reportedly working on a delayed new novel – a murder set in the Midwest – and has signed on with the Hogarth Shakespeare...

Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik [in Library Journal]

03 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Biography, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Ruth Bader Ginsberg (b. 1933) is legend: she was Columbia University's first female tenured professor; she published the first casebook on sex discrimination; she was the second woman to sit on the nation's highest court; and she was the first Supreme Court justice to...

Shelter by Jung Yun [in Library Journal]

05 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean American, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Faced with financial crisis, college professor Kyung Cho and his wife, Gillian, are considering selling their overmortgaged home. During the initial realtor meeting, the couple discovers Kyung's mother wandering disoriented and naked beyond their backyard. Kyung misunderstands his mother's garbled Korean – the language she...

Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand in the Sun and Be Your Own Person by Shonda Rhimes [in Library Journal]

04 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Rhimes has become one of television's most powerful women – her ShondaLand production company owns Thursday night with Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and How To Get Away with Murder. But career success aside, Rhimes is an introvert who was perfectly happy turning down most of...

Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family by Amy Ellis Nutt [in Library Journal]

30 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Jonas and Wyatt entered the world as identical twin boys, adopted by Kelly and Wayne Maines after being born to Kelly's teenage cousin who wasn't ready to be a mother. By toddlerhood, Wyatt vocalized that she was a girl; Jonas always recognized he had...

The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith [in Library Journal]

14 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Han Kang, a South Korean writing professor with Iowa Writers Workshop training, makes her English-translation debut with this spare, spectacular novel, in which a multigenerational, seemingly traditional Seoul family implodes. Yeong-hye, the youngest of three adult children, repeatedly announces "I had a dream," violent, bloody,...

The Gap of Time [Hogarth Shakespeare] by Jeanette Winterson [in Library Journal]

10 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Black/African American, British, Fiction, Repost

Jeanette Winterson inaugurates “The Hogarth Shakespeare” series – “a major international project [that] will see Shakespeare’s plays reimagined by some of today’s bestselling and most celebrated writers” – with a contemporary reinvention of The Winter’s Tale. In Winterson’s version, the setting moves between post-2008 market-crashed London and a...

Stars Between the Sun and Moon: One Woman’s Life in North Korea and Escape to Freedom by Lucia Jang with Susan McClelland [in Library Journal]

16 Nov, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Audio, Canadian, Canadian Asian Pacific American, Korean, Memoir, Nonfiction, North Korean, Repost

Within mere months, four memoirs – including Stars – by North Korean women hit U.S. shelves: Hyeonseo Lee’s The Girl with Seven Names and Eunsun Kim’s A Thousand Miles to Freedom debuted in July; Yeonmi Park’s In Order to Live hit in September; and Stars...

The Hundred Year Flood by Matthew Salesses [in Library Journal]

20 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean American, Repost

Lying in a Boston hospital with “rare brain damage,” Tee is working toward “reorienting him[self] to the world he’d never understood.” He is 22, a mixed-race Korean American adoptee, evacuated back home after a vicious attack in Prague, where he lived for nine months following 9/11....

Love Love by Sung J. Woo [in Library Journal]

19 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean American, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW At 40, Kevin Lee, an almost-tennis-pro-turned-club-instructor, finds out he’s adopted when he tries to donate a kidney to his less-than-deserving widower father. The only clues to Kevin's identity are an unfinished letter from his late mother with a nude centerfold of his birthmother. Meanwhile, his younger...

The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness by Kyung-sook Shin, translated by Ha-yun Jung [in Library Journal]

15 Oct, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Credited with revitalizing Korea’s publishing industry, Shin’s 2011 Please Look After Mom (the author’s debut in English) made this international powerhouse the first woman to win the Man Asian Literary Prize. Her latest, arriving stateside 20 years after its Korean publication, is part memoir,...

The Investigation by J.M. Lee, translated by Chi-Young Kim [in Library Journal]

20 Aug, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Watanabe Yuichi sits behind bars in Japan’s infamous Fukuoka Prison. After World War II, the former “soldier-guard” is now an incarcerated “low-level war criminal” under U.S. control. His written confession, which highlights two people — “one prisoner and one guard; one poet and one...

Wind / Pinball by Haruki Murakami, translated by Ted Goossen [in Library Journal]

06 Aug, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Before A Wild Sheep Chase made Murakami an international sensation, he wrote these “kitchen-table novels,” so named for where his composition efforts took place after he wrapped up managing his Tokyo jazz bar for the day. Both Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973...

The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer [in Library Journal]

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

Aatish Taseer's latest opens with a mother's call to her Manhattan-based son, asking him to ferry his just-deceased father's body from Geneva back to Delhi. Though a minor Indian prince, "Toby" G.M.P.R. Kalasuryaketu – half-actually Scottish, half-Indian – was more a foreign "novelty" in his...

A Perfect Crime by A Yi, translated by Anna Holmwood [in Library Journal]

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

While most teenagers his age are assiduously studying for college entrance exams, the narrator instead plots the eponymous perfect crime. Sent away by his widowed mother, for whom he has little respect, he lives with his Auntie, a woman he "hates." She could have been...

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