The Women on the Island by Ho Anh Thai, translated by Phan Thanh Hao, Celeste Bacchi, and Wayne Karlin [in aMagazine: Inside Asian America]
From one of Vietnam’s most prolific writers, The Women on the Island offers a rare glimpse into post-war Vietnam, surely an unfamiliar scenario to most English-readers, about the lonely, isolated...
Tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top humor fest about an ex-Hollywood child star glitterati wannabe looking for Mr. Right.
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After her father is killed by terrorists, young Kenyan Indian woman arrives to unwelcoming relatives in Paris, and escapes to wend her way through various men.
Review:
Fabulous, dark love story of twisted sorts between a Chinese prostitute and a young white boy during the brutal days of late 1800s San Francisco.
Review:
A quirky debut collection populated by the inhabitants of a fictional California seaside town, not unlike Half Moon Bay. Lee's memorable characters are so real, you'll swear you know some of them! Absolutely fabulous.
Review: <a href="http://bookdragonreviews.wordpress.com/files/2009/08/amagazine-2001-0607-new-and-notable.pdf"...
The best of the latest crop of South Asian diaspora titles is The Death of Vishnu, a startling debut novel, the first of a planned trilogy by math professor
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...
The premise of this disappointing novel revolves around Ramji, who, by the time he arrives in the U.S. in 1968 from his home in Dar es Salaam, East Africa (now Tanzania), he is already doubly displaced....
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...
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...
The phenomenon of transracial adoption is literally changing the face of – for lack of a better word – ethnic literature. Check out the recent titles: Darin Strauss's Chang and Eng, a...
Court Intrigue: An interview with Liza Dalby about her new book, The Tale of Murasaki
Six hundred years before the Western world saw its first novel, Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s brilliant tome, The Tale...
Kyoko Mori’s Stone Field, True Arrow is a love story – or sorts. An exasperating one, at that, filled with characters emotionally paralyzed to the point of utter immobility. Maya...
My initial reaction – and it does not fade through the course of the book – is utter annoyance at yet another non-Asian exoticizing, objectifying, making inscrutable the Asian culture and its people. But...
Raj Kamal Jha’s slim debut novel, The Blue Bedspread, is fabulous. It is perhaps the best book I’ve read this year – maybe even several years. It’s also a precious find, not the least...
To reveal that the theme song to Meera Syal's novel, Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee is Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” might...
A matchmaker reveals to Wei Gu who his wife will be. The old man explains that at birth, couples are bound together by a red thread that cannot be broken. But Wei’s chosen mate,...
Long ago, Uncle Wu fell in love with and married Shell, a beautiful woman who is able to transform herself into a seashell. The evil king hears about...
A young husband is called off to war, leaving his wife behind. The tree spirit assumes the husband’s image and goes to live with the wife. The real husband returns and must seek the...
Sookan, the protagonist from