The Exiles (formerly published as The Two Krishnas) is classic story of love and loss told from the perspectives of a wife, husband and his lover. At the center of the novel is Pooja Kapoor, a betrayed wife and mother whose world capsizes when she discovers her husband, Rahul, has fallen in love with another man, Atif. The Exiles evokes unforgettable characters to explore how, with a new world come new freedoms, and with them, the choices that could change everything we know about those we thought we knew, including ourselves. Set in Kenya, India and finally, Los Angeles, where it culminates in an epic conclusion. The Exiles was a finalist for the prestigious Lambda Literary Award.

https://ghalibdhalla.com/novels/exilesus/

With buoyant humor and incisive, cunning prose, Rahul Mehta sets off into uncharted literary territory. The characters in QUARANTINE—openly gay Indian-American men—are Westernized in some ways, with cosmopolitan views on friendship and sex, while struggling to maintain relationships with their families and cultural traditions. Grappling with the issues that concern all gay men—social acceptance, the right to pursue happiness, and the heavy toll of listening to their hearts and bodies—they confront an elder generation’s attachment to old-country ways. Estranged from their cultural in-group and still set apart from larger society, the young men in these lyrical, provocative, emotionally wrenching, yet frequently funny stories find themselves quarantined.

http://rahulmehtawriter.com/quarantine/

Introducing a fresh, exciting Chinese-American voice, Girl in Translation is an inspiring debut about a young immigrant in America, a smart girl who, living a double life between school and sweatshop, understands that her family’s future is in her hands.

When Kimberly Chang and her mother emigrate from Hong Kong to Brooklyn squalor, she quickly begins a secret double life: exceptional schoolgirl during the day, Chinatown sweatshop worker in the evenings. Disguising the more difficult truths of her life—the staggering degree of her poverty, the weight of her family’s future resting on her shoulders, her secret love for a factory boy who shares none of her talent or ambition—Kimberly learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself, back and forth, between the worlds she straddles.

https://www.jeankwok.com/girl-in-translation

AN EPIC JOURNEY THROUGH ONE OF AMERICA’S MOST TRANSFORMATIVE DECADES VIA THE STORIES OF THE ACTIVISTS, LABORERS, AND STUDENTS WHO SHAPED IT.Dazzling and ambitious, this multivoiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco near the end of the 1960s. As Karen Tei Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies, and personal turmoil.

The tenth anniversary edition of this National Book Award finalist brings the joys and struggles of the I Hotel to a whole new generation of readers, historians, and activists.

https://coffeehousepress.org/products/i-hotel-reissue

He was raised by his mother alone, as she was by her father. She wondered if his mother, who had set up their date, had told him about that.

Siyu was thirty-eight, and the man, Hanfeng, was forty-four. Siyu’s father, after supporting her through college, had remarried, choosing a woman thirty years his junior. The woman had a young son from her previous marriage, whom Siyu’s father had taken on as his responsibility. The boy was now in his last year of high school, and Siyu, having told her father many times that he deserved peace and simplicity, maintained a respectful distance from his new family. Each year she spent New Year’s Eve, and sometimes other holidays, with Hanfeng’s mother, who had been her zoology professor in college. There was no way to predict when the older woman would be in the mood to invite Siyu, so she tried to keep herself uncommitted, which meant that most of the holidays she spent alone.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/13/gold-boy-emerald-girl 
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/102887/gold-boy-emerald-girl-by-yiyun-li/

Burnings – A chapbook of poetry by Ocean Vuong (Cover art by Ashley Blazawski). The poems of Burnings explore refugee culture, be the speaker a literal refugee from a torn homeland, or a refugee from his own skin, burning with the heat of awakening eroticism. In this world, we’re all refugees from something…
https://siblingrivalrypress.bigcartel.com/product/pre-order-burnings-by-ocean-vuong

Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70s and 80s, Linda Hammerick believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. For as long as she can remember, Linda can “taste” words. In this and other ways, her body is a mystery to her. With the help of her great-uncle Harper, who loves her and loves to dance, and her best friend Kelly, with whom Linda exchanges almost daily letters though they live only streets away from each other, Linda makes her way through a girlhood haunted by these incantatory last words that her grandmother says to her: “What I know about you, little girl, would break you in two.”
https://monique-truong.com/books/bitter-in-the-mouth/

This book attempts to individualize the Filipino immigrant experience to the United States, and is made up of an idiosyncratic suite of poems the poet envisions as a theater of poetry.
https://unipress.ateneo.edu/product/beauty-ghosts-five-voices-theater-poetry-0

The award-winning author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon and The Resistersdelivers “[a] triumph of a novel…. Jen reflects America, at its best, its worst, its most vulnerable” (The Miami Herald), and asks deep questions about religion, love, home, and meaning.

Hattie Kong, a retired teacher and a descendant of Confucius, has decided that it’s time to start over. She moves to the peaceful New England town of Riverlake, a place that once represented the rock-solid base of American life. Instead of quietude, Hattie discovers a town challenged by cell-phone towers, chain stores, and struggling farms. Soon Hattie is joined by an immigrant Cambodian family on the run, and—quite unexpectedly—Carter Hatch, a love from her past.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/87014/world-and-town-by-gish-jen/

At the renowned writing school in Bonneville, every student is simultaneously terrified of and attracted to the charismatic and mysterious poet and professor Miranda Sturgis, whose high standards for art are both intimidating and inspiring. As two students, Roman and Bernard, strive to win her admiration, the lines between mentorship, friendship, and love are blurred.

Roman's star rises early, and his first book wins a prestigious prize. Meanwhile, Bernard labors for years over a single poem. Secrets of the past begin to surface, friendships are broken, and Miranda continues to cast a shadow over their lives. What is the hidden burden of early promise? What are the personal costs of a life devoted to the pursuit of art? All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost is a brilliant evocation of the demands of ambition and vocation, personal loyalty and poetic truth.
https://lansamanthachang.com/books

From the acclaimed 5 Under 35 winner, comes a razor-sharp, hilarious, and touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space-time.

Every day in Minor Universe 31 people get into time machines and try to change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician, steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls, Yu visits his mother and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. The key to locating his father may be found in a book. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and somewhere inside it is information that will help him. It may even save his life.
https://www.charlesyuauthor.com/book/how-to-live-safely-in-a-science-fictional-universe/

"Smart, funny, angry, political, and utterly poetic . . . both haunting and humorous." —The Rumpus
https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393341157/about-the-book/description

After losing both parents to a flu pandemic that seriously threatens his own life as well, thirteen-year-old Cole Vining is sent to live with an evangelical pastor and his wife in Salvation City, a small town in southern Indiana. There, Cole feels sheltered and loved but never as if he truly belongs. Everything about his new home is vastly different from the secular world in which he was raised. As he tries to adjust, he struggles also with memories of the past, a struggle made more difficult by the fact that he had lost his parents at a time when family relations were at their most fraught and unhappy. How is he to remember them now? Are they still his parents if they are no longer there? Must he accept what those around him believe, that because his parents did not know Jesus they are condemned to hell? During this time, Cole finds solace in drawing comics, for which he has a remarkable gift, and in fantasies about being a superhero.

Salvation City is a story of love, betrayal, and forgiveness. It is about spiritual and moral growth, and the consolation of art. It is about belief—belief in God and belief in self. As others around him grow increasingly fixed on the hope of salvation and a new life to come through an imminent rapture, Cole imagines a different future, one in which his own dreams of happiness and heroism begin to seem within reach.
https://sigridnunez.com/books/salvation-city/