The month of May honors Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. Here is a list of books our staff have selected to celebrate AA.NH/PI experiences, history, and works.
Fiction Titles | Nonfiction Titles
After the tragic death his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house-a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce....At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. ....The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki-bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane, and heartbreaking.
Startling stories that center the bodies, memories, myths, and relationships of Asian American women, from the National Book Award “5 Under 35” honoree and author of Bestiary....With each tale, K-Ming Chang gives us her own take on a surrealism that mixes myth and migration, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian. Stunningly told in her feminist fabulist style, these are uncanny stories peeling back greater questions of power and memory.
Ocean's 8 meets Blade Runner in this trail-blazing debut science fiction novel and swashbuckling love letter to Hawai'i about being forced to find a new home and striving to build a better one - unmissable for fans of Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir and Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo.
In this smart and swoony adventure rom-com, a journalist and a movie star find themselves teaming up to cover up a murder...and falling for each other in the process.
Set in New York and China over three decades, Paper Names explores what it means to be American from three different perspectives. There's Tony...who immigrated to the United States to give his family a better life. His daughter, Tammy...who grapples with the expectations of a first generation American and her own personal desires. Finally, there's Oliver, a handsome white lawyer with a dark family secret and who lives in the building where Tony works. A violent attack causes their lives to intertwine in ways that will change them forever.
A glittering, bold, darkly funny novel about two sisters--one in New York, one in Singapore--who are bound by an ancient secret.
Inspired by the legend of Xishi, one of the famous Four Beauties of Ancient China, A Song to Drown Rivers is an epic historical fantasy about womanhood, war, sacrifice, and love against all odds as the fate of two kingdoms hangs in a delicate balance. ....Xishi's beauty is seen as a blessing to the villagers of Yue--convinced that the best fate for a girl is to marry well and support her family. When Xishi draws the attention of the famous young military advisor, Fanli, he presents her with a rare opportunity: to use her beauty as a weapon.
Claudia Lin is looking at a cliched post-college future as a chronically underemployed English major--much to the consternation of her mother, who wants her to settle down and start dating a nice Chinese boy already...But Claudia is used to keeping secrets from her family. Such as the fact that she prefers girls--and that she's embarking on an unsuitable but supremely fun career. Veracity...has recruited Claudia via an online murder mystery game....But when one of her very first clients turns up dead, Claudia breaks with Veracity's protocols to investigate.
"In his infamous opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) Chief Justice Taney had denied that any American descended from Africans, whether free or slave, could claim citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause repudiated this principle. The Fourteenth Amendment's connection to birthright citizenship, however, is not built exclusively through the lives and fortunes of black citizens. It requires an understanding of the Chinese experience of migration to the United States, and Wong Kim Ark v. United States (1898) lies at the center of this story.
Providing the most comprehensive examination to date of Asians in the Centennial State, William Wei addresses a wide range of experiences, from anti-Chinese riots in late nineteenth-century Denver to the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans at the Amache concentration camp to the more recent influx of Southeast Asian refugees and South Asian tech professionals....The result is a groundbreaking approach that helps us better understand how Asians survived―and thrived―in an often hostile environment.
Sophia Chang is a badass of the music industry. As the daughter of Korean immigrants in predominantly white suburban Vancouver, she grew up shunning the "model minority" myth. Armed with a fierce sense of independence, she moved to New York City and infiltrated the world of hip-hop, yet remained mostly in the shadows of the artists she supported. With her debut memoir, Sophia Chang is finally ready to grab the mic for herself.
A posthumous collection of over 200 breathtaking photographs that document the history and cultural impact of the Asian American social justice movement, through the lens of beloved photographer Corky Lee--the man who sought to change the world one photograph at a time. Using his camera as his pen and sword, Corky Lee documented Asian American-Pacific Islander communities for fifty continuous years, breaking the stereotype of Asian Americans as docile, passive, and, above all, foreign to this country.
The story of Anna May Wong, who fought virulent anti-Chinese xenophobia, unabashed sexism, cinematic exploitation and ageism that defined American culture in the 20th century to became Hollywood's first Chinese American film star.
In her hit Netflix comedy special Baby Cobra, an eight-month pregnant Ali Wong resonated so strongly with viewers that she became a popular Halloween costume. Wong told the world her remarkably unfiltered thoughts on marriage, sex, working women, and why you never see new-mom comics on stage but you sure see plenty of new dads. Wong's sharp insights and humor are even more personal in this completely original collection.
Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world. As an activist, psychotherapist, conflict mediator, spiritual healer, and celebrated writer, she's always pursued the same deeply personal mission: to embrace the revolutionary belief that every human being, no matter how hateful or horrible, is intrinsically sacred....Kai Cheng began writing letters to everyone she has trouble holding in her heart-those seemingly beyond saving. In writing these love letters, Kai Cheng found herself not only rediscovering and deepening her faith in humanity, but falling back in love with being human.
Imbler discovers that some of the most radical models of family, community, and care can be found in the sea, from gelatinous chains that are both individual organisms and colonies of clones to deep-sea crabs that have no need for the sun, nourished instead by the chemicals and heat throbbing from the core of the Earth. Exploring themes of adaptation, survival, sexuality, and care, and weaving the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family, relationships, and coming of age, How Far the Light Reaches is a shimmering, otherworldly debut that attunes us to new visions of our world and its miracles.
With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.
When journalist Annabelle Tometich picks up the phone one June morning, she isn’t expecting a collect call from an inmate at the Lee County Jail. And when she accepts, she certainly isn’t prepared to hear her mother’s voice on the other end of the line. However, explaining the situation to her younger siblings afterwards was easy; all she had to say was, “Mom shot at some guy. He was messing with her mangoes.” They immediately understood. Answering the questions of the breaking-news reporter—at the same newspaper where Annabelle worked as a restaurant critic––proved more difficult.
The American debut of an acclaimed New Zealand poet as she explores her identity as a 21st-century indigenous woman.
"'RISE' is a love letter to and for Asian Americans--a vivid scrapbook of voices, emotions, and memories from an era in which [their] culture was forged and transformed, and a way to preserve both the headlines and the intimate conversations that have shaped [their] community into who [they] are today.
Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodia refugee who lost everything and everyone--her house her country, her parents, her siblings, her friends--everything but the memories of her mother's kitchen, the tastes and aromas of the foods her mother made before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart.
From the artist and activist Bianca Mabute-Louie comes a brilliant cultural examination on Asian migration and (non) assimilation into mainstream American society.
By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as a radio producer at This American Life and had won an Emmy. But behind her office door she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk. After years of questioning what was wrong with her, she was diagnosed with Complex PTSD-a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years....Finding few resources to help her heal, Stephanie set out to map her experience onto the scarce scientific research on C-PTSD.
Drawing on a collection of original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more, Alice uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer. From her love of food and pop culture to her unwavering commitment to dismantling systemic ableism, Alice shares her thoughts on creativity, access, power, care, the pandemic, mortality, and the future.
Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, pop culture artifacts and political polemic. Written by two leading scholars and replete with paintings, photographs and images drawn from dime novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, polemical and pseudo-scholarly literature, and other pop culture ephemera, this book is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation.