In celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we’ve put together a list of some of our favorite books written by AAPI authors. Tweet us @curatormagazine and tell us your favorites.
The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes by Elissa R. Sloan
If you loved the Spice Girls and Tiger Beat back then, or Daisy Jones and The Six now, you won’t be able to put this one down.
The Selected Jenny Zhang by Jenny Zhang
A writer who’s won nearly every major literary award, Zhang’s signature blend of the profane and beauty disgust and delight in equal measure in her e-book essay collection. She wants to be gross on purpose, to defy the “meek and mild” asian woman stereotype a reader might be tempted to place on her. After all, she is only human, which is the point of writing at all, to tell your story in your own unique voice, a feat Zhang accomplishes better than almost any writer I know.
Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang
Most of the poems in this book, as in Chang’s preceding (and stunning) collection The Boss, are written in punctuationless free-verse that has the paradoxical air of headlong precision. (Here’s an example.) The Barbie Chang of the title combines in her name a notion of generically aspirational All-American beauty with a reminder, if not celebration, of heritage that marks her, and her daughter, as an outsider despite her full ensconcement in American life. The wordplay tempers and ramifies the melancholy pervading this amazing book.
The Last Story of Mina Lee by Nancy Jooyoun Kim
My heart broke a few times during this beautifully crafted glimpse into a daughter’s quest to understand her mother. Kim’s novel feels the way that life often does—slow to unfold yet always, relentlessly happening.
Rose by Li-Young Lee
This is Lee’s first book, from over thirty years ago, and the poems in it are patient, spacious, contemplative. When I first encountered them, I found them accessible but hard to engage, bordering on (I confess) what I took to be precious. As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to love Lee’s concision and patient rigor, his risky directness:
What binds me to this earth?
What remembers the dead
and grows towards them?
I’m tired of thinking.
I long to taste the world with a kiss.
The attention the poems display to what’s around us and how it links us to our inescapable past speaks out hope and possibility, for those who take the time to listen.
The Incendiaries by R.O.Kwon
Kwon’s first novel is a coming-of-age magic realism ivy league religious terrorism story (that classic trope) which plays with language and timelines in a way that makes the whole thing feel like a prose poem. I will be rereading it, slowly, to unearth all the beauty this dystopic tale has to offer.
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