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Discover a curated collection of powerful, joyful, and thought-provoking stories that highlight the rich diversity of Asian American and Pacific Islander voices. These books provide a meaningful way to honor the month by exploring experiences that span generations, cultures, and communities. Explore, reflect, and connect through the pages.
Contemporary Poetry Books
Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America
Nineteenth-century Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island, bags heavy with silks from their villages in Bengal. Demand for "Oriental goods" took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey's boardwalks to the segregated South. Bald's history reveals cross-racial affinities below the surface of early twentieth-century America.
Queen Ka'ahumanu of Hawaii
King Kamehameha the Great had 30 wives. Ka'ahumanu (c.1768-1832) was his favorite. Descended from Oceanian voyagers, she grew up in a society completely isolated from the rest of the world, her life enmeshed in dynastic wars. An elaborate system of taboos constrained it. In 1778, she was shocked by the arrival of alien ships, followed by an influx of foreigners. In their wake came devastating epidemics. Seizing power after the King's death, Ka'ahumanu overturned those taboos and guided her nation through revolutionary change, crucial to the unification of the Hawaiian Islands. Through sicknesses, romances, infidelities, murders, rebellions, pardons, travels, missionary work, and more, her story challenges many beliefs about American history, Christianity, and gender.
Violets
By Man Asian Literary Prize winner Kyung-Sook Shin, "a moving delve into a lonely psyche" that follows a neglected young woman's search for human connection in contemporary Seoul (YZ Chin). San is twenty-two and alone when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul's bustling city center. Haunted by childhood rejection, she stumbles through life, painfully vulnerable, stifled, and unsure. She barely registers to others, especially by the ruthless standards of 1990s South Korea. Throughout one hazy, volatile summer, San meets a curious cast of characters: the nonspeaking shop owner, a brash coworker, quiet farmers, and aggressive customers. Fueled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she plunges headfirst into an obsession with a passing magazine photographer. In Violets, best-selling author Kyung-Sook Shin explores misogyny, erasure, and repressed desire, as San desperately searches for both autonomy and attachment in the unforgiving reality of contemporary Korean society.
White Ivy
**A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick** A young woman's crush on a former classmate evolves into a story of love, lies, and dark obsession, offering stark insights into the immigrant experience as it hurtles to its electrifying conclusion. Ivy Lin is a thief and a liar--but you'd never know it by looking at her. Raised outside of Boston, Ivy's immigrant grandmother relies on Ivy's mild appearance for cover as she teaches her granddaughter how to pilfer items from yard sales and second-hand shops. Thieving allows Ivy to accumulate the trappings of a suburban teen--and, most importantly, to attract the attention of Gideon Speyer, the golden boy of a wealthy political family. But when Ivy's mother discovers her trespasses, punishment is swift, and Ivy is sent to China, and her dream instantly evaporates. Years later, Ivy has grown into a poised yet restless young woman, haunted by her conflicting feelings about her upbringing and her family. Back in Boston, when Ivy bumps into Sylvia Speyer, Gideon's sister, a reconnection with Gideon seems not only inevitable- it feels like fate. Slowly, Ivy sinks her claws into Gideon and the entire Speyer clan by attending fancy dinners and weekend getaways to the Cape. But just as Ivy is about to have everything she's ever wanted, a ghost from her past resurfaces, threatening the nearly perfect life she's worked so hard to build. Filled with surprising twists and a nuanced exploration of class and race, White Ivy is a glimpse into the dark side of a woman who yearns for success at any cost.
Golden Child
Drawing on true stories told by his maternal Chinese grandmother, David Hwang evokes the era when his great-grandfather defied Confucian tradition by converting to Christianity and freeing his daughter's feet.
Bitna
The French writer and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate J. M. G. Le Clézio is one of the most widely translated authors in the world and is widely considered a living legend of French literature. He also harbors a keen interest in Korea that not only prompted him to learn and master the Korean language on his own but also inspired his new novel. BITNA: UNDER THE SKY OF SEOUL is Le Clézio's portrait of Seoul--its people and its places--rendered with an intimate familiarity and attention to detail that few non-Korean writers, not to mention non-natives of Seoul, could replicate. It is a story of life in the city as it is being lived today.
Olympic Boulevard
Olympic Boulevard is a full-length novel by Philip Onho Lee that depicts the joys and sorrows of Korean immigrants in the United States. The story centers on a group of Koreans who emigrated to the United States in 1981 to build a new life and pursue the American Dream. Drawing on his experiences as a first-generation immigrant, Lee vividly depicts the ups and downs of Koreans' struggle to adjust to American life through lively storytelling and humor. This version was rendered into English by Korean-American translator John Cha.
From Honolulu to Brooklyn
From 1912 to 1916, a group of baseball players from Hawaii barnstormed the U.S. mainland. While initially all Chinese, the Travelers became increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, with ballplayers possessing ancestries that included Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, and European. As a group and as individuals, the Travelers' experiences represent a still-marginalized facet of baseball and sports history. Arguably, they traveled more miles and played in more ballparks in the American empire than any other group of ballplayers of their time. Outside of the major leagues, they were likely the most famous nine of the 1910s, dominating their college opponents and more than holding their own against top-flight white and black independent teams. And once the Travelers' journeys were complete, a team leader and star, Buck Lai, gained fame in independent baseball on the East Coast of the U.S., while former teammates ran base paths and pursued political office, confronting racism and colonialism in Hawaii.
Pangs of Love and Other Writings
An apprentice sushi chef and a mysterious, blue-eyed woman share a bottle of wine inside a climate-controlled aquarium. The Great Wall of China grumbles as workers forego construction to watch an imperial game of baseball. A young woman tries to imagine a future unsullied by her family's history of untimely death. First issued in 1991, Pangs of Love introduced David Wong Louie's bold storytelling. The son of Chinese immigrants, he centered his stories around characters who conflict with their place in the world, disconnected from both American society and their own families. The depth of his portrayals renders their experiences of love, envy, loneliness, loss, and duty universal. Informed by their heritage yet not confined by it. These twelve short stories and one essay swerve from the absurd to longing for love, understanding, or simply a morsel of food. Pangs of Love and Other Writings makes Louie's debut book available again, along with an additional short story and an extraordinary autobiographical essay. Eat, Memory, in which he reflects on life without food after throat cancer took away his ability to swallow. Pulitzer Prize? Winner Viet Thanh Nguyen contributes a foreword elucidating Louie's role in shaping contemporary Asian American literature. At the same time, an afterword by literary scholar King-Kok Cheung retraces the three phases of Louie's career.
Patron Saints of Nothing
A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * A powerful coming-of-age story about grief, guilt, and the risks a Filipino-American teenager takes to uncover the truth about his cousin's murder. A Kirkus Reviews Best Young Adult Book of the Century "Brilliant, honest, and equal parts heartbreaking and soul-healing." --Laurie Halse Anderson, author of SHOUT "A singular voice in the world of literature." --Jason Reynolds, author of Long Way Down, Jay Reguero plans to spend the last semester of his senior year playing video games before heading to the University of Michigan in the fall. But when he discovers that his Filipino cousin Jun was murdered as part of President Duterte's war on drugs, and no one in the family wants to talk about what happened, Jay travels to the Philippines to find out the real story. Hoping to uncover more about Jun and the events that led to his death, Jay is forced to reckon with the many sides of his cousin before he can face the whole horrible truth -- and the part he played in it. As gripping as it is lyrical, Patron Saints of Nothing is a page-turning portrayal of the struggle to reconcile faith, family, and immigrant identity.
The Memory Police
*** 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST *** *** LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE AND THE 2020 TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD *** *** NEW YORK TIMES 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF THE YEAR *** A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, from the acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses--until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.
Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia
Reality merges with illusion in this novel of northwestern China. Winner of the 2024 New York City Big Book Award in the World Literature category Finalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Multicultural Fiction category Xue Mo's novel Curses of the Kingdom of Xixia presents a rich tapestry of the history, religion, lore, and customs of a region in present-day northwestern China. During its heyday, the Sino-Tibetan kingdom of Xixia (pronounced see-sia; 1038-1227), also known as the Tanguts, rivaled the Song dynasty (960-1279) of China and boasted a cavalry so formidable that the Chinese paid tribute to it to maintain peace. Using the discovery of "lost" manuscripts as a frame, the novel presents historical events and tales of semi-fictional characters, including the avatar of a local Tantric Buddhist goddess, a Dakini/Vajrayogini named Snow Feather. Taking readers through different historical periods and the various geographical and cultural spaces of the region, Xue Mo reveals truths by blurring the distinctions between good and evil, beauty and hideousness, reality and fiction, and permanence and impermanence. Magical realism and mimesis coexist. Reality merges with illusion, the mundane with the supernatural.