Library Journal Archives - Page 15 of 17

In the Country: Stories by Mia Alvar [in Library Journal]

15 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Filipina/o American, Repost, Short Stories, Southeast Asian American

*STARRED REVIEW Few writers, even the most seasoned, can produce collections of evenly superb stories. Mia Alvar triumphs on her first try. Her nine stories reflect her own peripatetic background (Manila born, Bahrain/New York raised, Harvard/Columbia educated), featuring a cast of immigrants, expats, travelers, runaways, and...

Odysseus Abroad by Amit Chaudhuri [in Library Journal]

06 Apr, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, British, British Asian, Fiction, Indian, Repost, South Asian

This latest from Amit Chaudhuri (Freedom Song; The Immortals) offers minimal plot: a 22-year-old homesick Indian literature student and aspiring poet wakes in his shabby London studio, practices his singing, meets his university tutor, delivers his rent, and visits his uncle Radhesh, with whom he...

The Four Books by Yan Lianke, translated by Carlos Rojas [in Library Journal]

02 Feb, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese, Fiction, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Yan Lianke (Dream of Ding Village) has built his substantial career on exposing the surreal absurdity of China's 20th-century tragedies. His latest-in-translation features the 99th district of a reeducation camp, where intellectuals controlled by a maniacally cruel yet innocently naïve child endure merciless conditions...

Frog by Mo Yan, translated by Howard Goldblatt [in Library Journal]

16 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese, Fiction, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Wan Xin, aka Gugu, is a revered obstetrician who has delivered generations of Gaomi Township citizens over the last half century. Yet for every live birth, she's aborted at least as many pregnancies, proving her patriotism by fervently upholding China's one-child policy; even relatives...

The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami, translated by Ted Goossen [in Library Journal]

15 Dec, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Debuting mere months after his latest instant bestseller, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, this fable is a surprise addition to Murakami’s addictive oeuvre. After returning his library books, a boy is sent to Room 107 in search of other titles. There...

She Weeps Each Time You’re Born by Quan Barry [in Library Journal]

04 Nov, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Repost, Southeast Asian, Southeast Asian American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese American

*STARRED REVIEW In 2001, on an evening with a full moon –when Asian folklore says a rabbit appears on the lunar surface – Amy Quan searches for a woman in Vietnam, "where I was born in the same year as her, our lives diametrically opposite." The...

Map of Betrayal by Ha Jin [in Library Journal]

24 Sep, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese, Chinese American, Fiction, Hapa/Mixed-race, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW CIA agent Gary Shang was convicted of spying for China yet called himself "a patriot of both the United States and China." Decades after Gary's death, Lilian, his only child with his American wife, unexpectedly inherits his diary from his longtime mistress and discovers...

I Am China by Xiaolu Guo [in Library Journal]

18 Aug, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, British, British Asian, Chinese, Fiction, Repost

London-based Xiaolu Guo’s third novel in English (she published six prior in China) opens with a desperate love letter-in-transit "from a place I cannot tell you about yet…when I am safe I will be able to let you know where I am." Over almost 400...

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami, translated by Philip Gabriel [in Library Journal]

16 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW In high school, Tsukuru Tazaki was part of a "perfect community" of five best friends. Each had a color attached to their family names – red, blue, white, black –except for Tsukuru, rendering him "colorless." After Tsukuru begins college in Tokyo, he's brutally excised...

Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng [in Library Journal]

01 May, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese American, Fiction, Hapa/Mixed-race, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW Celeste Ng’s debut is one of those aching stories about which the reader knows so much more than any of the characters, even as each yearns for the unknowable truth. “Lydia is dead,” the novel opens – blunt, unnerving, devastating. She’s only 16, the middle of three...

The Great White Way: Race and the Broadway Musical by Warren Hoffman [in Library Journal]

06 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Black/African American, Chinese American, Drama/Theater, Jewish, Native American/First Nations/Indigenous Peoples, Nonfiction, Repost

Theater producer/critic/playwright Warren Hoffman (The Passing Game) insists that audiences have been "duped" into believing that the Broadway musical "is the most innocent of art forms when, in fact, it is one of America's most powerful, influential, and even at times polemical arts precisely because...

I’ll Be Right There by Kyung-sook Shin, translated by Sora Kim-Russell [in Library Journal]

04 Mar, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Repost, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW "I do not specifically reveal the era or elucidate Korea's political situation," writes Kyung-sook Shin, recipient of the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize for Please Look After Mom, in the ending of her latest spectacular novel in English translation. Ironically, those missing details make this story...

The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith [in Library Journal]

16 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Hapa/Mixed-race, Repost, Short Stories, Southeast Asian, Southeast Asian American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese American

*STARRED REVIEW What is most haunting in Kupersmith's nine multi-layered pieces are not the specters, whose tales are revealed as stories within stories, but the lingering loss and disconnect endured by the still living. With an American father and a Vietnamese "former boat refugee" mother, the...

Kinder Than Solitude by Yiyun Li [in Library Journal]

15 Jan, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Chinese, Chinese American, Fiction, Repost

*STARRED REVIEW In her first title since she received a 2010 MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship, Yiyun Li again explores the far-reaching repercussions of a single person's death. While her mesmerizing The Vagrants (2009) revolved around the execution of a young political victim, here, three childhood friends take...

On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee [in Library Journal]

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

*STARRED REVIEW Once revealed in context, this book's title alone is an astonishing feat of encapsulated genius from the inimitable Chang-rae Lee. Control, individuality, nature, perfection, reality, society – all that and more fill this dystopic treatise about a not-so-futuristic, ruined America. At the beginning, 16-year-old Fan simply...

Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him by David Henry and Joe Henry [in Library Journal]

03 Sep, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Biography, Black/African American, Nonfiction, Repost

The latest biography of "the world's most brilliant stand-up comedian" is the culmination of a project that took more than a decade (originally intended as a three-act screenplay) by screenwriter David Henry and his brother, musician Joe Henry. Born in 1940 in Peoria, IL, Richard...

A True Novel by Minae Mizumura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter and Ann Sherif [in Library Journal]

01 Sep, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese, Repost, Translation

A Japanese writer, also named Minae Mizumura, recalls her privileged expatriate New York childhood, then witnesses her family devolve in adulthood. A Tokyo-based editor takes a countryside vacation and meets an older woman who shares fantastical memories of some of the inhabitants. A village girl...

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri [in Library Journal]

15 Aug, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, Fiction, Indian, Indian American, Repost, South Asian, South Asian American

*STARRED REVIEW Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri's (The Interpreter of Maladies) unparalleled ability to transform the smallest moments into whole lives pinnacles in this extraordinary story of two brothers – so close that one is "the other side" of the other – coming of age in the political...

Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon [in Library Journal]

04 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Korean American, Repost, South American

* STARRED REVIEW After surviving the Korean War, Yohan spends another year in a prisoner-of-war camp south of the new border that splits the country in two. Rather than return north, where no one awaits him, Yohan begins life anew in a faraway coastal Brazilian village as...

On Sal Mal Lane by Ru Freeman [in Library Journal]

03 Jun, by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Absolute Favorites, Adult Readers, Fiction, Repost, South Asian, South Asian American, Sri Lankan, Sri Lankan American

* STARRED REVIEW As in Ru Freeman’s absorbing 2009 debut, A Disobedient Girl, the intricate lives of young children also take center stage in this latest work. In 1979, the titular Sal Mal Lane is a cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Sri Lanka’s largest city and former...

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