Showing titles in Asian American

On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer's Diary with the words "too much and not the mood." She was describing how tired she was of correcting her own writing, of the "cramming in and the cutting out" to please other readers, wondering if she had anything at all that was truly worth saying. The character of that sentiment, the attitude of it, inspired Durga Chew-Bose to write and collect her own work. The result is a lyrical and piercingly insightful collection of essays and her own brand of essay-meets-prose poetry about identity and culture.

Things get personal for Chinese-Norwegian modern-day ninja Lily Wong in Hong Kong when she dives into the dangerous world of triads, romance, and corporate disaster during the height of the pro-democracy protests.

Willa Chen has never quite fit in. Growing up as a biracial Chinese American girl in New Jersey, Willa felt both hypervisible and unseen, too Asian to fit in at her mostly White school, and too White to speak to the few Asian kids around. After her parents’ early divorce, they both remarried and started new families, and Willa grew up feeling outside of their new lives, too.

If Grace is being honest, she knows her choices skate past questionable and probably into destructive. But her heart is broken and the guy who broke it—her ex Josh—keeps hinting at a reunion. So when her best friends, Tiff and Camille, suggest they take a girls trip to help her get over her heartache, Grace doesn’t hesitate to recommend Cancún. She just doesn’t mention that Josh also happens to be there.

On paper, Zoe Zeng has made it in New York’s fashion world. After a string of unpaid internships, she’s now a fashion columnist at Chic, lives in a quaint apartment in Manhattan, and gets invited to exclusive industry events. But life in New York City isn’t as chic as Zoe imagined.

What happens when everything falls away, when those you call on in times of need are themselves calling out for rescue? In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

When Fumiko emerges after one month locked in her dorm room, she's already dead, leaving a half-smoked Marlboro Light and a cupboard of petrified food in her wake. For her boyfriend, Henrik, an aspiring translator, these remnants are like clues, propelling him forward in a search for meaning. Meanwhile, Fumiko, or perhaps her doppelganger, reappears: in line at the Louvre, on street corners and subway platforms, and on the dissection table of a group of young medical students, including “you”.

Filipino-American bounty hunter Domingo has made a career of catching criminal undocumented immigrants. He’s the best in the business—and it isn’t lost on him that he’s so good because of his similarities to his targets. Despite Domingo’s claims that he is unsympathetic to their plight, yet spends his spare moments on stakeouts and in between jobs writing a book of advice for aspiring immigrants. Brash, funny, and candid, he compiles the names of all the people he’s apprehended, documenting the hazards of his profession, and imparting advice to foreigners who dare to dream of life in America.

SAN FRANCISCO, 1958. World War 2 veteran, Katsuhiro, “Kats” Takemoto is a Nisei, second generation Japanese American and the private detective for those who don’t get noticed by the police or get the attention of traditional private eyes. The city is exploding with population growth and creative expression. When a young Beat poet enlists Kats to keep his family from being pushed out of the Bayview Heights neighborhood by a shady developer, Kats learns that the conspiracy to take over the land around Hunters Point runs deep into Cold War fears and politics.

Vikram is not your model Indian-American teenager. Growing up in late 1980s Wisconsin, he is rebellious, adrift, and resentful of his Indian roots. But a disastrously drunken weekend becomes a one-way ticket back to the homeland for Vikram after his outraged parents decide to pack up the family and return to India.

In the summer of 1986, in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future.

A young man painting nails at the local salon. A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant. A father who packs furniture to move into homes he'll never afford. A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas. In her stunning Giller Prize-winning debut book of fiction, Souvankham Thammavongsa focuses on characters struggling to make a living, illuminating their hopes, disappointments, love affairs, acts of defiance, and above all their pursuit of a place to make their own.

Lisa Pearl is an American teaching English in Japan, and the situation there - thanks mostly to her spontaneous, hard-partying ways - has become problematic. Now she’s in Seoul, South Korea, with her childhood best-friend, Mindy. The young women share a special bond: They are both Korean-born adoptees into white American families. Mindy is in Seoul to track down her birth mom, and wants Lisa to do the same. Trouble is Lisa isn’t convinced she needs to know about her past, much less meet her biological mother.

At the age of thirty-nine, Alice Chang suddenly finds herself living in the last place she expected: her mother’s house. But in the face of divorce, eviction, and the recent death of her father, she doesn’t have a choice. Watching as her mother thrives in a new job and meets younger men at the local gym, Alice struggles, reflecting on her parents’ marriage, her relationship with each of them, as she adjusts to being single again for the first time in twenty years. Then she finds her father’s old journal...and uncovers a shocking family secret.

Based on traditional Vietnamese folk tales told to Violet Kupersmith by her grandmother, these fantastical, chilling, and thoroughly contemporary stories are a boldly original exploration of Vietnamese culture, addressing both the immigrant experience and the lives of those who remained behind. Lurking in the background of them all is a larger ghost—that of the Vietnam War, whose legacy continues to haunt us.

Girls Get HUMILIATED When SHOPPING, What Happens To Them Next Is Shocking! A gripping story that follows the life of Adalyn James, whose Husband Remy Stone is a powerful mafia boss. When Remy takes Adalyn and their mother shopping, chaos ensues as he humiliates the sales attendant and spends a fortune on luxury items. But that's only the beginning. Remy's flashy lifestyle puts everyone in danger as his enemies close in, leaving Adalyn to deal with the consequences. Will Adalyn be able to protect her family, or will they pay the price for Remy's reckless behavior? My Poor Husband is A ...

In the face of a slow but impending apocalypse, what binds three seemingly divergent lives (a writer, a photographer, an old man), isn’t the commonality of a perceived future death, but the layered and complex fabric of how loss, abuse, trauma, and death have shaped their pasts, and how these pasts continue to haunt their present moments, a moment in which time seems to be running out.

"Where are you from . . . ? No—where are you from from?" It's a question every Asian American gets asked as part of an incessant chorus saying you'll never belong here, you're a perpetual foreigner, you'll always be seen as an alien, an object, or a threat. Monica Youn's From From brilliantly evokes the conflicted consciousness of deracination. If you have no core of "authenticity," no experience of your so-called homeland, how do you piece together an Asian American identity out of Westerners' ideas about Asians? Your sense of yourself is part stereotype, part aspiration, part guilt.

Inhabiting four lives - a railroad baron's valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption - this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive - as much through love as blood.

A luminous collection of heartbreaking, startling, and gloriously unique stories set among the Filipino communities of California and the Philippines - now with a new preface by the author, Monstress stands as a landmark of American multicultural short fiction. Lysley Tenorio's tales are framed by tense, fascinating dichotomies: tenderness and power, the fantastical and the realistic, pop culture and high culture, the American and the Filipino.