In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE MONTH: Time, Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan

Books can seduce you. They can, Sarah Chihaya believes, annihilate, reveal, and provoke you. And anyone incurably obsessed with books understands this kind of unsettling literary encounter. Sarah calls books that have this effect Life Ruiners.

Her Life Ruiner, Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, became a talisman for her in high school when its electrifying treatment of race exposed Sarah's deepest feelings about being Japanese American in a predominantly white suburb of Cleveland. But Sarah had always lived through her books, seeking escape, self-definition, and rules for living. She built her life around reading, wrote criticism, and taught literature at an Ivy League University. Then she was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and the world became an unreadable blank page. In the aftermath, she was faced with a question. Could we ever truly rewrite the stories that govern our lives?

Bibliophobia is an alternately searing and darkly humorous story of breakdown and survival told through books. Delving into texts such as Anne of Green Gables, Possession, A Tale for the Time Being, The Last Samurai, Chihaya interrogates her cultural identity, her relationship with depression, and the intoxicating, sometimes painful, ways books push back on those who love them.

The internationally bestselling therapy memoir translated by International Booker Prize shortlisted Anton Hur.

PSYCHIATRIST: So how can I help you?

ME: I don't know, I'm-what's the word-depressed? Do I have to go into detail?

Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her-what to call it?-depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgmental of others. She hides her feelings well at work, but the effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can't be normal. But if she's so hopeless, why can she always summon a desire for her favorite street food: the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like?

Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a twelve-week period, and expanding on each session with her own reflective micro-essays, Baek begins to disentangle the harmful behaviors that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse. Part memoir, part self-help book, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki is a book to keep close and to reach for in times of darkness.

Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror meets Cathy Park Hong's Minor Feelings in a meditation that blends memoir and cultural criticism to explore how the author's love affair with K-pop has shaped her sense of self, charting K-pop's complex coming-of-age through some of its biggest idols.

I'll Love You Forever: Notes from a K-Pop Fan is a smart, poignant, constantly surprising essay collection that considers the collision between stratospherically popular music and our inescapably personal selves. Giaae Kwon delves into the global impact of K-pop artists, from H.O.T. to Taeyeon to IU to Suga of BTS, and reveals how each illuminated and shaped her own life.

In using intimate experiences to examine larger cultural topics, this singular work breaks new ground in its consideration of K-pop. Written from the perspective of a bilingual and bicultural Korean American, I'll Love You Forever blends the critical with the personal. Kwon interweaves profiles of different K-pop idols with ruminations on various aspects of Korean culture, from the country's attitude toward plastic surgery and female sexuality to its obsession with academia. Combining insightful critique and adoring analysis, I'll Love You Forever provides readers with a fuller picture of a culturally and socially complex industry and the machine and heart behind its popularity. Above all, Kwon offers up the passion of a superfan, finding joy in K-pop along the way.

The sequel to the internationally bestselling South Korean therapy memoir, translated by National Book Award finalist Anton Hur.

Whenever depression or emptiness came calling, I was all too eager to open the door of self-pity and go right inside.

Baek Sehee started recording her sessions with her psychiatrist because she hoped to create a guide for herself. She never imagined her reflections would reach so many people, especially young people. I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki became a runaway bestseller in South Korea, then Indonesia, the U.K., and the U.S., drawing readers with its frank and vulnerable discussions of depression and anxiety.

Healing is an uneven process. In this second book, Baek's sessions intensify as her inner conflicts become more complex and challenging. Through her dialogues with her psychiatrist and reflective micro-essays following each session, Baek traces the patterns of her anguish, makes progress, weathers setbacks, and shares the revelatory insights that come just when she has almost given up hope.

I Want to Die but I Still Want to Eat Tteokbokki offers itself to the social media generation as a book to hold close, a friend who knows that grappling with everyday despair is part of a lifelong journey.

Starting in 1975, Vietnam's boat people--desperate families seeking freedom--fled the Communist government and violence in their country any way they could, usually by boat across the South China Sea. Vicky Nguyen and her family were among them. Attacked at sea by pirates before reaching a refugee camp in Malaysia, Vicky's family survived on rations and waited months until they were sponsored to go to America.

But deciding to leave and start a new life in a new country is half the story...figuring out how to be American is the other. Boat Baby is Vicky's memoir of growing up in America with unconventional Vietnamese parents who didn't always know how to bridge the cultural gaps. It's a childhood filled with misadventures and misunderstandings, from almost stabbing the neighborhood racist with a butter knife to getting caught stealing Cosmo in the hope of learning Do You Really Think You Know Everything About Sex?

Vicky's parents approached life with the attitude, Why not us? In the face of prejudice, they taught her to be gritty and resilient, skills Vicky used as she combatted stereotyping throughout her career, fending off the question Aren't you Connie Chung? to become a leading Asian American journalist on television. She delivers a uniquely transparent account of her life, revealing how she negotiated her salary in a competitive industry, the challenges of starting a family, and the struggle to be a dutiful daughter.

Funny, nostalgic, and poignant, Boat Baby is a testament to the messy glue that bonds a family. In the tradition of We Are Dreamers by Simu Liu and Dear Girls by Ali Wong, Vicky Nguyen offers an optimistic story full of heart that illuminates the promise of what America can be.

Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.--Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

In development as a television series starring and adapted by Greta Lee - One of Time's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year - Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, New Statesman, BuzzFeed, Esquire, The New York Public Library, and Book Riot

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative--and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of minor feelings. As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these minor feelings occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality--when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they're dissonant--and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her.

With sly humor and a poet's searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche--and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.

Praise for Minor Feelings

Hong begins her new book of essays with a bang. . . .The essays wander a variegated terrain of memoir, criticism and polemic, oscillating between smooth proclamations of certainty and twitches of self-doubt. . . . Minor Feelings is studded with moments [of] candor and dark humor shot through with glittering self-awareness.--The New York Times

Hong uses her own experiences as a jumping off point to examine race and emotion in the United States.--Newsweek

Powerful . . . [Hong] brings together memoiristic personal essay and reflection, historical accounts and modern reporting, and other works of art and writing, in order to amplify a multitude of voices and capture Asian America as a collection of contradictions. She does so with sharp wit and radical transparency.--Salon

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.

As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

Chosen one of Booklist's Top Ten History Books of the Year!

The Afterlife Is Letting Go is a meditative consideration of Japanese American incarceration during WWII by Brandon Shimoda, author of the PEN Open Book Award-winning The Grave on the Wall.--Matt Seidel, Publishers Weekly's Big Indie Books

Both personal and choral, The Afterlife is Letting Go is deeply felt, precise, and as generous in its insights as it is unsparing in its critiques of how 'exclusion zones' proliferate and reach across time and space. A stirring, trenchant, and necessary work.--Christina Sharpe, author of Ordinary Notes

In a series of reflective, multi-layered, sometimes multi-voiced essays, poet Brandon Shimoda explores the afterlife of the U.S. government's forced removal and mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, excavating the ways these events continue to resonate today. What emerges is a panoramic, yet intimate portrait of intergenerational trauma and healing.

Informed by personal/familial history, years of research and travel, including visits to museums, memorials and the ruins of incarceration sites, these essays take us on both a physical and a metaphysical journey. What becomes increasingly clear are the infinite connections between the treatment of Japanese Americans and other forms of oppression, criminalization, dispossession, and state violence enacted by the United States, past, present, and ongoing.

Born in 1961 in war-torn Laos, Tswb's childhood was marked by the violence of America's Secret War and the CIA recruitment of the Hmong and other ethnic minorities into the lost cause. By the time Tswb was a teenager, the US had completely vacated Laos, and the country erupted into genocidal attacks on the Hmong people, who were labeled as traitors. Fearing for their lives, Tswb and her family left everything they knew behind and fled their village for the jungle.

Perpetually on the run and on the brink of starvation, Tswb eventually crossed paths with the man who would become her future husband. Leaving her own mother behind, she joined his family at a refugee camp, a choice that would haunt her for the rest of her life. Eventually becoming a mother herself, Tswb raised her daughters in a state of constant fear and hunger until they were able to emigrate to the US, where the determined couple enrolled in high school even though they were both nearly thirty and worked grueling jobs to provide for their children.

Now, her daughter, Kao Kalia Yang, reveals her mother's astonishing saga with tenderness and clarity, giving voice to the countless resilient refugees who are often overlooked as one of the essential foundations of this country. Haunting and painfully relevant (Booklist), Where Rivers Part is destined to become a classic.

In Chinatown, Qian's parents labor in sweatshops. Instead of laughing at her jokes, they fight constantly, taking out the stress of their new life on one another. Shunned by her classmates and teachers for her limited English, Qian takes refuge in the library and masters the language through books, coming to think of The Berenstain Bears as her first American friends. And where there is delight to be found, Qian relishes it: her first bite of gloriously greasy pizza, weekly shopping days, when Qian finds small treasures in the trash lining Brooklyn's streets, and a magical Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center--confirmation that the New York City she saw in movies does exist after all.

But then Qian's headstrong Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness that she has kept secret for months for fear of the cost and scrutiny of a doctor's visit. As Ba Ba retreats further inward, Qian has little to hold onto beyond his constant refrain: Whatever happens, say that you were born here, that you've always lived here.

Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.

A daughter of Korean immigrants, Hyeseung Song spends her earliest years in the cane fields of Texas where her loyalties are divided between a restless father in search of Big Money, and a beautiful yet domineering mother whose resentments about her own life compromises her relationship with her daughter. With her parents at constant odds, Song learns more words in Korean for hatred than love. When the family's fake Gucci business lands them in bankruptcy, Song moves to a new elementary school. On her first day, a girl asks the teacher: Can she speak English?

Neither rich nor white, Song does what is necessary to be visible: she internalizes the model minority myth as well as her beloved mother's dreams to see her on a secure path. Song meets these expectations by attending the best Ivy League universities in the country. But when she wavers, in search of an artistic life on her own terms, her mother warns, Happiness is what unexceptional people tell themselves when they don't have the talent and drive to go after real success. Years of self-erasure take a toll on Song as she experiences recurring episodes of depression and mania. A thought repeats: I want to die. I want to die. Song enters a psychiatric hospital where she meets patients with similar struggles. So begins her sweeping journey to heal herself by losing everything.

A celebration of resilience and a testament to the power of art to heal and transform (Chloé Cooper Jones, two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and author of Easy Beauty), Docile is one woman's story of subverting the model minority myth, contending with mental illness, and finding her self-worth by looking within.

RECIPE: HOW TO CHANGE CLOTH INTO DIAMOND

Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and 1 wholesale extermination. Subtract a reliable source of food, life savings, and family members, until all are gone. Shave down childhood dreams for approximately two decades, until only subsistence remains.

In Slow Noodles, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodian refugee who loses everything and everyone--her home, her family, her country--all but the remembered tastes and aromas of her mother's kitchen. She summons the quiet rhythms of 1960s Battambang, her provincial hometown, before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart and killed more than a million Cambodians, many of them ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family. Then, as an immigrant in Saigon, Nguon loses her mother, brothers, and sister and eventually flees to a refugee camp in Thailand. For two decades in exile, she survives by cooking in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, making and selling street food, becoming a suture nurse, and weaving silk.

Nguon's irrepressible spirit and determination come through in this lyrical memoir that includes more than twenty family recipes such as sour chicken-lime soup, green papaya pickles, and pâté de foie, as well as Khmer curries, stir-fries, and handmade bánh canh noodles. Through it all, re-creating the dishes from her childhood becomes an act of resistance, of reclaiming her place in the world, of upholding the values the Khmer Rouge sought to destroy, and of honoring the memory of her beloved mother, whose slow noodles approach to healing and cooking prioritized time and care over expediency.

Slow Noodles is an inspiring testament to the power of food to keep alive a refugee's connection to her past and spark hope for a beautiful life.

RECIPE: HOW TO CHANGE CLOTH INTO DIAMOND

Take a well-fed nine-year-old with a big family and a fancy education. Fold in 2 revolutions, 2 civil wars, and 1 wholesale extermination. Subtract a reliable source of food, life savings, and family members, until all are gone. Shave down childhood dreams for approximately two decades, until only subsistence remains.

In Slow Noodles, Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodian refugee who loses everything and everyone--her home, her family, her country--all but the remembered tastes and aromas of her mother's kitchen. She summons the quiet rhythms of 1960s Battambang, her provincial hometown, before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart and killed more than a million Cambodians, many of them ethnic Vietnamese like Nguon and her family. Then, as an immigrant in Saigon, Nguon loses her mother, brothers, and sister and eventually flees to a refugee camp in Thailand. For two decades in exile, she survives by cooking in a brothel, serving drinks in a nightclub, making and selling street food, becoming a suture nurse, and weaving silk.

Nguon's irrepressible spirit and determination come through in this lyrical memoir that includes more than twenty family recipes such as sour chicken-lime soup, green papaya pickles, and pâté de foie, as well as Khmer curries, stir-fries, and handmade bánh canh noodles. Through it all, re-creating the dishes from her childhood becomes an act of resistance, of reclaiming her place in the world, of upholding the values the Khmer Rouge sought to destroy, and of honoring the memory of her beloved mother, whose slow noodles approach to healing and cooking prioritized time and care over expediency.

Slow Noodles is an inspiring testament to the power of food to keep alive a refugee's connection to her past and spark hope for a beautiful life.

With the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the U.S. war in Vietnam ended, but the refugee crisis was only beginning. Among the millions of people who fled Vietnam by boat were Vinh Nguyen, along with his mother and siblings, and his father, who left separately and then mysteriously vanished.

Decades later, Nguyen goes looking for the story of his father. What he discovers is a sea of questions drifting above sunken truths. To come to terms with the past, Nguyen must piece together the debris of history with family stories that have been scattered across generations and continents, kept for decades in broken hearts and guarded silences.

The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse takes readers on a poignant tour of disappeared refugee camps, abandoned family homes, and the lives that could have been. As the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, this powerful memoir is timelier and more important than ever, illuminating the stories, real and imagined, that become buried in the rubble of war.

In Living the Asian Century, Kishore Mahbubani vividly chronicles his own life going from a poor childhood in a multiethnic neighborhood to an illustrious diplomatic career that led him far from Singapore to the United States.

Along the way Mahbubani has become one of Asia's most widely known commentators and spokespeople, with a unique perspective that straddles India, China, and the West.

A compelling and prismatic love story of one family's defiance in the face of injustice--and how their story echoes across generations.

It is both overwhelming and affirming to imagine, in the midst of their darkest hours, and in the middle of a country and a war that willfully misperceived them as enemy aliens, that the future, for Itaru and Shizuko Ina, was not only possible, but would deliver redemption in the form of the intimate, inexhaustible attention of a daughter. --Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall

In 1942 newlyweds Itaru and Shizuko Ina were settling into married life when the United States government upended their world. They were forcibly removed from their home and incarcerated in wartime American concentration camps solely on account of their Japanese ancestry. When the Inas, under duress, renounced their American citizenship, the War Department branded them enemy aliens and scattered their family across the U.S. interior. Born to Itaru and Shizuko during their imprisonment, psychotherapist and activist Satsuki Ina weaves their story together in this moving mosaic. Through diary entries, photographs, clandestine letters, and heart-wrenching haiku, she reveals how this intrepid young couple navigated life, love, loss, and loyalty tests in the welter of World War II-era hysteria.

The Poet and the Silk Girl illustrates through one family's saga the generational struggle of Japanese Americans who resisted racist oppression, fought for the restoration of their rights, and clung to their full humanity in the face of adversity. With psychological insight, Ina excavates the unmentionable, recovering a chronicle of resilience amidst one of the severest blows to American civil liberties. As she traces the legacies of trauma, she connects her family's ordeal to modern-day mass incarceration at the U.S.-Mexico border. Lyrical and gripping, this cautionary tale implores us to prevent the repetition of atrocity, pairing healing and protest with galvanizing power.

An emotionally raw memoir about the crumbling of the American Dream and a daughter of refugees who searches for answers after her mother dies during plastic surgery.

Susan Lieu has long been searching for answers. About her family's past and about her own future. Refugees from the Vietnam War, Susan's family escaped to California in the 1980s after five failed attempts. Upon arrival, Susan's mother was their savvy, charismatic North Star, setting up two successful nail salons and orchestrating every success--until Susan was eleven. That year, her mother died from a botched tummy tuck. After the funeral, no one was ever allowed to talk about her or what had happened.

For the next twenty years, Susan navigated a series of cascading questions alone--why did the most perfect person in her life want to change her body? Why would no one tell her about her mother's life in Vietnam? And how did this surgeon, who preyed on Vietnamese immigrants, go on operating after her mother's death? Sifting through depositions, tracking down the surgeon's family, and enlisting the help of spirit channelers, Susan uncovers the painful truth of her mother, herself, and the impossible ideal of beauty.

The Manicurist's Daughter is much more than a memoir about grief, trauma, and body image. It is a story of fierce determination, strength in shared culture, and finding your place in the world.

The Book of Awesome Asian Women illuminates the stories of powerful Asian women who have shaped history, providing inspiration and recognition to their incredible contributions across the globe.

A Crucial Addition to Women's History. In a world where the accomplishments of women are finally being celebrated, The Book of Awesome Asian Women brings much-needed attention to the underrepresented stories of Asian women throughout history. This book continues the legacy of the successful Awesome Women series by amplifying the voices of those who have often been overlooked or misrepresented. Perfect for anyone seeking gifts for Asian women or gifts for girls, this book ensures these important stories are shared.

Empowering Stories for a New Generation. Authored by Karen Wang Diggs, a passionate advocate for social justice and gender equality, this book delves into the lives of Asian women and girls who have left indelible marks on the world. Karen's dedication to uncovering and sharing these lesser-known stories makes this book an empowering resource for readers seeking representation and inspiration. The Book of Awesome Asian Women is an essential read for those interested in famous women in history and Asian American books.

Inside, you'll find:

• Inspiring stories of famous women in history, from empresses like Wu Ze Tian to groundbreaking scientists and artists like Dr. Soyeon Yi and Amy Tan; perfect for anyone looking for a female artists book or notable female scientists.
• Empowerment through representation, offering young adult to adult readers the chance to see themselves in the legacies of strong women who defied the odds, including the often-misunderstood dragon lady archetype.
• A rich addition to your collection of women's history books.

If you liked Women Who Dared, Women in White Coats, or The Book of Awesome Women, you'll love The Book of Awesome Asian Women.

Born in 1961 in war-torn Laos, Tswb's childhood was marked by the violence of America's Secret War and the CIA recruitment of the Hmong and other ethnic minorities into the lost cause. By the time Tswb was a teenager, the US had completely vacated Laos, and the country erupted into genocidal attacks on the Hmong people, who were labeled as traitors. Fearing for their lives, Tswb and her family left everything they knew behind and fled their village for the jungle.

Perpetually on the run and on the brink of starvation, Tswb eventually crossed paths with the man who would become her future husband. Leaving her own mother behind, she joined his family at a refugee camp, a choice that would haunt her for the rest of her life. Eventually becoming a mother herself, Tswb raised her daughters in a state of constant fear and hunger until they were able to emigrate to the US, where the determined couple enrolled in high school even though they were both nearly thirty and worked grueling jobs to provide for their children.

Now, her daughter, Kao Kalia Yang, reveals her mother's astonishing saga with tenderness and clarity, giving voice to the countless resilient refugees who are often overlooked as one of the essential foundations of this country. Haunting and painfully relevant (Booklist), Where Rivers Part is destined to become a classic.