Six months after Nitish Roy’s death, his wife and two daughters gather in Calcutta, India where Bijou Roy as the oldest must send her father’s ashes down the holy river to eternal rest. The haphazard ceremony – made even more so because she is not...
*STARRED REVIEW Comprising 10 novellas that took 10 years to craft, this is Yamashita’s (Circle K Cycles) magnum opus. Year by year, the novellas mark a decade’s worth of tumultuous Asian Pacific American (APA) history, from 1968, when ethnic studies was painfully birthed in San Francisco,...
Although at first glance, this might look like a children's title – it is essentially a picture book – the sometimes difficult contents make it much more suitable for middle grade readers and older. Even adults will certainly find deeply resonating moments to appreciate throughout. Ntozake...
Stuck in a virtual version of 1971, Koizumi Kyoko knows that unmasking the Friend will have irrevocable consequences. Past and present, both the 1971 and 2014 versions of the Chief try desperately to save her ...
It's 2014 and just-escaped-against-all-odds Otcho and his manga artist sidekick Kakuta are finally back in Tokyo ...
If you’re reading this review, $4 lattes or $15 lunches are probably not shock-inducing numbers. Now think about this: “Two dollars feeds a child for a week...
Mukhtar Mai's story is heartbreaking, gut-wrenching, even nauseating ...
Last night, six of my book hens (my mother likes to refer to my book club as "the chicken coop," which has an amusing ring to it in Korean: "kkoh-kkoh-jang") got together for a lively discussion of Canyon Sam's debut, Sky Train. Even though I...
Okay, so I'm not quite sure of the U.S. publication date for Xinran's latest ...
Five years ago, Taipei-born Malaysian British Tash Aw landed in the media spotlight with The Harmony Silk Factory, complete with public speculations about an allegedly enormous debut advance. Decorated with multiple important prizes, including Commonwealth and Whitbread first novel awards, Aw’s Factory earned him both...
If the observations, memories, and pop culture references here weren't so obviously recognizable in our post-9/11 western world, you might have read this graphic memoir as a hack comedy. The black-and-white panels initially seem almost unfinished, as if still in rough-draft mode. The contents might...
Regardless of your politics (although there's no mistaking where longtime comics creator Larry Hama and the rest of his funny cronies' loyalties lie), you will definitely find many moments to guffaw over in this four-part comic series too entertaining to put down! The New Ice Age has...
Timing is everything, right? Last weekend, I had our teenage daughter and a friend of hers wandering NYC, and we happened to do the fabulous, downloadable Soundwalk/Chinatown walking tour narrated by Chinatown native Jami Gong – all three of us were attached to one iPod...
Art director for an alternative city paper by day, comics artist whenever he has the time, SAM (Secret Asian Man, yes!) – not so unlike his own creator Tak Toyoshima – fights stereotypes when he can, makes biting commentaries when frustrated, and generally tries to...
Young Evelyn gets dumped at her surprised aunt’s posh NYC penthouse so her neglectful father can take yet another honeymoon with the latest young wife. Evelyn’s managed to escape her lonely life by creating her very own manga series, “The Amazing Adventures of Zirconium Man...
The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West, by Christopher Corbett, is an oddly disturbing read, not so much for its content but for its publication as a historical text about Asian American pioneer woman Polly Bemis, Corbett's eponymous "poker bride." Problems with historical...
Barbara Demick, currently the Beijing bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, spent five years as Seoul's bureau chief where she had unprecedented access to North Koreans. Her interviews, which began in 2001, eventually became Nothing to Envy, a mind-boggling, heartbreaking, surreal-ly humanizing portrait of six...
I used to think of myself as a well-rounded reader ...
Winner of the 2009 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, Philip Hoose's inspiring title brings much-needed focus on a brave 15-year-old girl who decided, "You just have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.'" In March 1955, nine months before Rosa...
