Showing titles in Asian American & Pacific Islander

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.

Monica Tsai spends most days on her computer, journaling the details of her ordinary life and coding for a program that seeks to connect strangers online. A self-proclaimed recluse, she's always struggled to make friends and, as a college freshman, finds herself escaping into a digital world, counting the days until she can return home to her beloved grandparents. They are now in their nineties, and Monica worries about them constantly—especially her grandmother, Yun, who survived two wars in China before coming to the States, and whose memory has begun to fade.

From the National Book Award “5 Under 35” honoree and author of Bestiary comes startling stories that center the bodies, memories, myths, and relationships of Asian American women. In “Auntland,” a steady stream of aunts adjust to American life by sneaking surreptitious kisses from women at temple, buying tubs of vanilla ice cream to prepare for citizenship tests, and hatching plans to name their daughters “Dog.” In “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” ghost-cousins cross space, seas, and skies to haunt their live-cousin, wife to a storm chaser.

In South Korea, a 105-year-old woman receives a letter. Ten days later, she has been thrust into the afterlife, fighting to head off a curse that will otherwise devastate generations to come. Hak Jeonga has always shouldered the burden of upholding the family name. When she sent her daughter-in-law to America to cover up an illegitimate birth, she was simply doing what was needed to preserve the reputations of her loved ones. How could she have known that decades later, this decision would return to haunt her?

1941. Following the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, the wealthy Tang family has settled in Hong Kong, believing it to be protected under British occupation. As the First Wife of the family, Mingzhu leads a glamorous, if at times lonely, existence—mothering the son of her husband’s concubine, overseeing her daughter Qiang’s education, and directing their household of servants, including her long-time confidante, Biyu. But when the Japanese invade Hong Kong, the paths of Mingzhu, Qiang, and Biyu wildly diverge.

Carson Bradley is the CEO of Bradley Pharmaceutical Corporation, a powerful and influential multi-billion dollar drug empire. His wealth spans beyond anyone's imagination, but is useless to his lonely soul, which has been dormant since the death of his first love to cancer. Every day he strives for the sake of his research because he's determined to eradicate that vile disease forever. Lillian Ly is a young, humble medical student whose compassion for people is boundless.

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.

Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, literary voices of the Vietnamese-American diaspora, as well as Vietnam-based authors, speak to the experience of those who left and those who stayed in THE COLORS OF APRIL, a collection of new short fiction curated by award-winning translators and editors Quan Manh Ha and Cab Tran.

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.

Set in Philly one year into Trump’s presidency, Sean Thor Conroe’s audacious, freewheeling debut follows our eponymous fuccboi, Sean, as he attempts to live meaningfully in a world that doesn’t seem to need him. Reconciling past, failed selves — cross-country walker, SoundCloud rapper, weed farmer — he now finds himself back in his college city, trying to write, doing stimulant-fueled bike deliveries to eat.

In his haunting and fearless debut, Ocean Vuong walks a tightrope of historic and personal violences, creating an interrogation of the American body as a borderless space of both failure and triumph. At once vulnerable and redemptive, dreamlike and visceral, compassionate and unforgiving, these poems seek a myriad existence without forgetting the prerequisite of self-preservation in a world bent on extinguishing its othered voices. Vuong's poems show, through breath, cadence, and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the most necessary of hungers.

Jin-Lu knows she should be happy. Princess Yi-Nireen of Kerina Rut and Prince Kadrin of Kerina Sol have united after ten long years, having survived a near-apocalypse at the hands of Yi-Nireen’s relative. They are happy and in love—thanks to Jin—and they want her to join them at their upcoming nuptials in Kerina Sol. But happiness always comes at cost. Jin has left Yi-Nireen and Kadrin’s ivory tower, hiding a secret: her ability to use mana was lost in the fallout of saving the world, and she can no longer ride a magebike.

A young woman with a foothold in two cultures, Rei Shimura has gone wherever fortune and her unruly passions have led her throughout her chaotic 20s. Now, after the streamers for her 30th birthday celebration have been taken down, the Japanese-American antiques dealer and part-time sleuth finds herself with an assignment to find and authenticate an ancient Middle Eastern pitcher that disappeared from Iraq's national museum.

Sometimes Therapy Isn’t Enough finds the author coping with mental health struggles through poetry. The book is divided into four chapters, taking the listener on a raw emotional journey through anxiety, addiction, depression, and grief.

Jobless with a PhD, Lee Lien returns home to her Chicago suburb from grad school, only to find herself contending with issues she's evaded since college. But when her brother disappears, he leaves behind an object from their mother's Vietnam past that stirs up a forgotten childhood dream: a gold-leaf brooch, abandoned by an American reporter in Saigon back in 1965, that might be an heirloom belonging to Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Noelle Tom really shouldn’t have eaten those dumplings at the night market. But the old woman at the stall said they’d give her what she needed most, and what Noelle desperately needed after another long workweek was food. Except now she’s reliving the same Friday. Every morning her alarm goes off at 6:45, and the Wordle answer is always “happy.” Worst of all, any work she does at her job as an engineer? It’s erased when she wakes up. Monday might never come in this workaholic’s nightmare.

American-Born Chinese P.I. Lydia Chin is called in on what appears to be a simple case. Jeff Dunbar, art world insider, wants her to track down a rumor. Contemporary Chinese painting is sizzling hot on the art scene and no one is hotter than Chau Chun, known as the Ghost Hero. A talented and celebrated ink painter, Chau's highly-prized work mixes classical forms and modern political commentary. The rumor of new paintings by Chau is shaking up the art world. There's only one problem - Ghost Hero Chau has been dead for twenty years, killed in the 1989 Tianamen Square uprising.

As a bounty hunter specializing in immigrants who do their status dirty, Domingo has had his fair share of dicey jobs. From traffickers peddling drugs, guns, and people to murderers and other fugitives, Domingo loves nothing more than putting the bad guys away. But his life’s not exactly fun and games. A seemingly easy case involving a lovestruck young heiress turns out to be anything but. Tessa Woodridge, a fast-food chain CEO, hires Domingo to find the undocumented parents of Julian Alondra, the love of her life. When Tessa was eight, fourteen-year-old Julian saved her life.

While classic war films played, Old Second and his countrymen found intimacy in the screening rooms. In the box office, Bao Mei sold movie tickets to closeted men, guarding their secrets and finding her own happiness with the projectionist. But when Old Second’s passion for his male lover is revealed, a series of haunting events unfold, propelling these characters toward an uncertain future in America.

When Moran, Ruyu, and Boyang were young, they were involved in a mysterious “accident” in which a friend of theirs was poisoned. Grown up, the three friends are separated by distance and personal estrangement. Moran and Ruyu live in the United States, Boyang in China; all three are haunted by what really happened in their youth, and by doubt about themselves. In California, Ruyu helps a local woman care for her family and home, and avoids entanglements, as she has done all her life. In Wisconsin, Moran visits her ex-husband, whose kindness once overcame her flight into solitude