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...
Half the Sky is a remarkable, life-changing book. It should be required reading for all adults (and more mature young adults), but especially for us overprivileged, lucky-solely-by-chance-of-birth citizens of the West. If there is ONE book you read this new year, let it be this...
One Halloween night when Anne Greves is 16, she goes with older friends to a jazz club and falls in love for the first time in her young life. Serey is an older man, already in his 20s, a musician, who has already lived too...
When 12-year-old Mahtab's father returns home with obvious signs of torture, and her grandfather is forever lost, her family knows it can no longer live in Taliban-controlled Herat, Afghanistan. Her best friend has already left without saying goodbye, hoping to find refuge somewhere in Iran....
In just over a hundred pages of sparse, haunting verse, LeZotte illuminates a part of the Holocaust tragedy that takes up little shelf space in libraries today: the organized mass murder of mentally ill and physically challenged people, as well as the massacre of European...
Even before this book hit U.S. shelves, French-born Turkish author Elif Shafak was charged with insulting "Turkishness" in violation of Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code because one of her characters refers to the large-scale massacre of Armenians that began in 1915 in Turkey as...
Not only will you be unable to put this down, you'll have to be careful to remember to breathe while reading this unforgettable debut novel written entirely in free verse. By age 10, Matt Pin has already had a harrowing life as a child of...
Lac Su is a survivor of things so harrowing that just recounting some of those experiences, even from the distance of a keyboard tapping out a review of his memoir, I Love Yous Are for White People, makes the heart wince. As a 5-year-old immigrant to...
Far too many immigration stories begin with an escape from tragedy – everything from economic hardship to devastating wars. The Armenian American experience is tragically rooted in the Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1918, the systematic massacre of an estimated 1 to 2 million Armenians. A...
Two half-brothers, Abe and Andy, the American descendants of Armenian refugees whose families have escaped the Armenian Genocide, have led very different lives in California's fertile Central Valley. Abe, the eldest, loses his father and is forced to take on adult responsibilities far too early by...
A harrowing anthology, comprised of 16 essays by some of the best writers of the international Indian diaspora, vividly explores the ravages of a too-fast growing AIDS community across India. Nikita Lalwani writes about a kind,...
A genre-defying four-book documentary that captures the raw lives of refugees surviving war in Chechnya, the deadly sex-trade along the Burma/Thai border, globalization in Mexico, and AIDS in Malawi. Sometimes, the jaw just drops in utterly...
When the brutal dictator Idi Amin violently grabbed power over Uganda, he declared in August 1972, that within 90 days all Indians would have to leave the country. Part of Uganda’s population since the 16th century,...
Indian-born, U.S.-, UK-, and now Denmark-domiciled Malladi is a literary chameleon, thanks in part to her changing addresses. Language, which features a young Afghan refugee woman escaping unnamable horrors under the Taliban, is almost like reading a sister text of Khaled Hosseini’s...
Jeff Talarigo can take some of the most horrific experiences a human being might face and somehow craft breathtakingly beautiful, haunting works of fiction. His luminous 2004 debut, The Pearl...
Something magical happens when prize-winning novelist Edwidge Danticat strings words together. From the most trivial details to breathtaking moments of enormous gravity, Danticat uses words as charms that gently beckon readers into her world and make...
While Samrat Upadhyay's latest short story collection, The Royal Ghosts: Stories, offers no happy endings, few feel-good moments, and hardly any contented characters, it is most undoubtedly an enticing book to savor and reread for all...
One child escapes, the other is left behind: In this continuation of the bestseller, First They Killed My Father, Ung recounts her journey from her war-torn homeland to a new American life....
Based on 15 years of experience as the faculty advisor to the Vietnamese Student Association at a San Jose, Calif., high school, Barry condenses his experiences to tell the story of a year in...
According to editors Nguyen and Sachs, “In the history of modern Vietnamese literature, no writer has provoked more debate than Nguyen Huy Thiep.” Indeed, his images of Vietnam are hardly flattering, a...
