Winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature from the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association.
Hilarity, heartbreak, observations of human nature as clear and sharp as his prose style—these have long been hallmarks of the critically acclaimed fiction of Don Lee. But never before has he been as funny, or as tragic, or as revealing as in The Collective.
Joshua Yoon seems larger than life to his classmates at Macalester College, especially to those who will become his closest friends, narrator Eric Cho and the gorgeous Jessica Tsai. Bawdy, brainy, generous, and manipulative, he rallies them to stand up for themselves as Asian Americans, as nonconformists, as artists meant to break all the rules in the pursuit of truth and perfection. Little do they know the effect he will have on the rest of their lives.
https://don-lee.com/the-collective/index.html
Named a Best Book of 2012 by San Francisco Chronicle, Booklist, and Bookpage
“A richly emotional portrait of a family that had me spellbound from page one.” —Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of Wild
The night before Janie’s sister, Hannah, is born, her grandmother tells her a story: Since the Japanese occupation of Korea, their family has lost a daughter in every generation, and Janie is told to keep Hannah safe. Years later, when Hannah inexplicably cuts all ties and disappears, Janie goes to find her. Thus begins a journey that will force her to confront her family’s painful silence, the truth behind her parents’ sudden move to America twenty years earlier, and her own conflicted feelings toward Hannah.
Weaving Korean folklore within a modern narrative of immigration and identity, Forgotten Country is a fierce exploration of the inevitability of loss, the conflict between obligation and freedom, and a family struggling to find its way out of silence and back to one another.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/12924011
In the last days of the Chinese Empire, Pickens, a New England blueblood, arrives in the Forbidden City to tutor the young emperor, bidden by the ghost of a lost childhood love, the “darling, darling Annabelle.” In the lantern-lit corridors, Pickens finds not Annabelle but her seeming doppelgänger, a mixed-blood girl chosen as the emperor’s child bride. Bemoaning her confined existence in a palace filled with treacherous eunuchs and concubines, she bewitches the tutor. Pickens’s Lolita-esque affair with the thirteen-year-old empress, a blond “dazzle of a nymphet,” is the narrative backbone of the Chinese émigré writer Da’s sensual, if slim and breathless, novel. The story of contorted and entangled love excavates the depth of corruption and bureaucratic rot in a palace that has long ago become a ghost of its former self.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/07/my-last-empress
An unflinching portrayal of the Korean immigrant experience from an extraordinary new talent in fiction.
Spanning Korea and the United States, from the postwar era to contemporary times, Krys Lee's stunning fiction debut, Drifting House, illuminates a people torn between the traumas of their collective past and the indignities and sorrows of their present.
In the title story, children escaping famine in North Korea are forced to make unthinkable sacrifices to survive. The tales set in America reveal the immigrants' unmoored existence, playing out in cramped apartments and Koreatown strip malls. A makeshift family is fractured when a shaman from the old country moves in next door. An abandoned wife enters into a fake marriage in order to find her kidnapped daughter.
In the tradition of Chang-rae Lee's Native Speaker and Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, Drifting House is an unforgettable work by a gifted new writer.
https://www.kryslee.com/drifting-house-1
A third collection from an award-winning poet, author of Sightseer in this Killing City, whose “gift is breathtaking” (Naomi Shihab Nye)
The themes of identity, relationships, and the poet’s sense of origin are at the heart of Eugene Gloria’s rich and captivating new collection. The title poem weaves together Japan’s sixteenth-century warlord Hideyoshi with a meditation about the poet’s father’s dementia; “Here on Earth” embraces post-racial America and the speaker’s own sense of displacement in the Midwest. In elegy and psalm, as well as ancient forms from Asia such as the haibun and pantoum, these elegant and passionate poems enact rage, civility, love, travel, and art as well as explore Gloria’s own fears of frailty and erasure.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/311055/my-favorite-warlord-by-eugene-gloria/
Chinglish follows a white American businessman who travels to China, desperate to score a lucrative contact for his family's firm, only to discover how much he doesn't understand. Named for the unique and often comical third language that evolves from attempts to translate Chinese signs into English, Chinglish explores an evolving U.S. – China relationship where neither side is exactly what it pretends to be.
http://www.davidhenryhwang.com/plays-source/2016/7/26/chinglish
FROM THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF THE LONGSHOT comes this gripping saga about the destruction of a family, a home, and a way of life. Set on a struggling farm in a colonial country teetering on the brink of civil war, Gone to the Forest is a tale of family drama and political turmoil in which fiery storytelling melds with daring, original prose. Since his mother’s death, Tom and his father have fashioned a strained domestic peace, where everything is frozen under the old man’s vicious control. But when a young woman named Carine arrives at the farm, the tension between the two men escalates to the breaking point. Hailed by the Boston Globe as “a major talent,” Kitamura shines in this powerful new novel.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Gone-to-the-Forest/Katie-Kitamura/9781451656640
New York of the eighties: a time and a place where money is the most powerful intoxicant and glamour demands the embrace of excess. While fortunes are made in Soho galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transients - drag queens and dandies, strippers and artists - circulate through the streets, serving as the city's background color, cheap labor, and sleazy entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Oriental Girls Desire Romance, a young Chinese American woman, is a sharp and eloquent wit who skirts the edges of privilege and privation in this, New York's own floating world. A refugee from the neuroses of an Ivy League education and feudal obligations to an immigrant family, she is a theory junkie strung out on sexual and intellectual highs. Learning from the defiant grace of her snap queen friends, she navigates the demimonde with a wit that is at once perceptive, hilarious, and refreshingly unhinged.
https://kaya.com/books/oriental-girls-desire-romance/
The author of the widely praised debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe returns with a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly original collection of short stories.
A big-box store employee is confronted by a zombie during the graveyard shift, a problem that pales in comparison to his inability to ask a coworker out on a date . . . A fighter leads his band of virtual warriors, thieves, and wizards across a deadly computer-generated landscape, but does he have what it takes to be a hero? . . . A company outsources grief for profit, its slogan: “Don’t feel like having a bad day? Let someone else have it for you.”
Drawing from both pop culture and science, Charles Yu is a brilliant observer of contemporary society, and in Sorry Please Thank You he fills his stories with equal parts laugh-out-loud humor and piercing insight into the human condition. He has already garnered comparisons to such masters as Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams, and in this new collection we have resounding proof that he has arrived (via a wormhole in space-time) as a major new voice in American fiction.
https://www.charlesyuauthor.com/book/sorry-please-thank-you/
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