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Reads for Asian Heritage Month
May is Asian Heritage Month, and the perfect chance to check out new and new-to-you books by Asian-Canadian writers.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 65–80 of 128 resultsSorted by latest
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Cine Star Salon, The
$21.95Philippine-born Vancouverite Sophia is most grateful for two things: her modest hair salon and Adrian, her mild-mannered fiancé. She is eager to get married, move away from her highly educated but career-frustrated parents, who believe that their daughter can be so much more than a beautician.
Then Sophia’s estranged friend reaches out from Manila, desperate for help. After a dubious accident, her fiery Auntie Rosy is on the verge of losing the Cine Star Salon–the place where Sophia first felt the call to become a hairstylist and salon owner. Coming to her auntie’s aid is not so easy though. Sophia worries helping might reopen old wounds and threaten the bright future she has planned.
Leah Ranada’s debut novel is a graphic and engaging depiction of the importance of women’s work and the loyalties that connect friends across oceans. The Cine Star Salon marks the entry of a vital new voice in Canadian literature.
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Banana Boys: A Novel
$22.95What is the nature of Banana? To Luke, Dave, Mike, and Sheldon, it’s a curious predicament brought on by upbringing — growing up yellow on the outside, white on the inside. They’re together to pay their last respects to Rick, the one Banana Boy who seemed to have it all, but was found dead in his living room, apparently of suicide.
The tragedy that has reunited the Banana Boys becomes the point from which we are introduced to the intertwined stories of a group of young friends caught in cultural and social limbo. Not really Chinese and not quite Canadian, the Banana Boys stumble through situations, incidents and interactions that ultimately explore the nature of identity and reveal the possibilities each character has within himself.
Peppered with piercing insights and laced with comic anecdotes, Banana Boys provides unforgettable texture to the ordinary — and extraordinary — tribulations of being twentysomething, male, and Asian in Canada.
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Monster Child
$20.00In this powerful debut novel set in the spring of 2000, Rahela Nayebzadah introduces three unforgettable characters: Beh, Shabnam and Alif. In a world swirling with secrets, racism and danger we watch through the eyes of these three children as Nayebzadah’s family of Afghan immigrants try to find their way in an often uncaring Canadian society. But as the sexual assault of thirteen-year-old Beh spirals into a series of terrible events that threaten to unleash the past and destroy the family, the reader is left wondering who is the monster child? Is it Beh, who says she is called a disease? Is it Shabnam, who cries tears of blood? Is it Alif, who in the end declares, “We are a family of monsters”? Or are the monsters all around us?
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Saturn Peach
$20.00In Saturn Peach, Lily Wang establishes a distinctive voice that is part heartbreak and part wise witness chronicling the strangeness of a technologized world. When asked to describe her book, Wang answered in her quintessential way, “There are things I never want to know but always know. Every day I live with them. Every day I live. I am like a young fruit. Like a peach, common, not the popular kind but oblate, saturn. I live and inside me this pale fruit, yellow and white. I take bites out of myself and share them with you. Maybe you taste like me. Maybe you hold this fruit and become a tree.” If ever there were a book that disarmingly – and seemingly effortlessly – encouraged its reader to become a metaphor, then Saturn Peach is it.
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Four Sufferings, The
$20.95Shiku hakku in Japanese means to endure, an expression that originates in Buddhism. This collection links Terry Watada’s past and present while acknowledging the fundamental suffering of human existence–in birth, aging, illness, and death–and the suffering endured in daily living–common frustrations, desire, separation. But at the same time it celebrates love, and in the end seeks an enlightened state of acceptance. Rise above life’s hardships and rejoice in the state of life is the overall theme of this collection.
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Mirrors and Windows
$25.00Over the years Anna Yin has had the honour to translate more than 50 poets’ works. With more and more people growing interested in translation and bilingual poetry, it is time to publish these translations in book form. I hope this serves as a good resource, and will further stimulate wider and stronger interest and conversation for cross-cultural exchange. As Maya Angelou said: “I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.” I hope this contribution will open more of these homes.
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barangay
$18.00As beautiful and varied as an archipelago, barangay is an elegant new collection of poetry from Adrian De Leon that gathers in and arranges the difficult pieces of a scattered history. While mourning the loss of his grandmother who “lived, loved and grieved in three languages,” De Leon skips his barangay, which is both a boat and an administrative unit in the Philippine government, over the history of both his family and a nation. In these poems De Leon considers the deadly impact of colonialism, the far-reaching effects of the diaspora from the Philippines and the personal loss of his ability to speak Ilokano, his grandmother’s native tongue. These are spare, haunting poems, which wash over the reader like the waves of the ocean the barangays navigated long ago and then pull the reader into their current like the rivers De Leon left behind.
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Quiet Night Think
$21.95“Quiet Night Think is a stunning work.” — Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing
“One function of the poet at any time is to discover by his own thought and feeling what seems to him to be poetry at that time,” writes Wallace Stevens. In Quiet Night Think, award-winning poet Gillian Sze expresses her own definition.
During the remarkable period of early parenthood, Sze’s new maternal role urges her to contemplate her own origins, both familial and artistic. Comprised of six personal essays, poems, and a concluding long poem, Quiet Night Think takes its title from a direct translation of an eighth-century Chinese poem by Li Bai, the subject of the opening essay. Sze’s memory of reading Li Bai’s poem as a child marks the beginning of an unshakable encounter with poetry. What follows is an intimate anatomization of her particular entanglement with languages and cultures.
In her most generically diverse book yet, Sze moves between poetry and prose, mother and writer, the lyrical and the autobiographical, all the while inviting readers to meditate with her on questions of emergence and transformation: What are you trying to be? Where does a word break off? What calls to us throughout the night?
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Ezra’s Ghosts
$20.95Award-winning author Darcy Tamayose returns with Ezra’s Ghosts, a collection of fantastical stories linked by a complex mingling of language and culture, as well as a deep understanding of grief and what it makes of us. Within these pages a scholar writes home from the Ryukyu islands, not knowing that his hometown will soon face a deadly calamity of its own. Another seeker of truth is trapped in Ezra after her violent death, and must watch how her family—and her killer—alter in her absence. The oldest man in town, an immigrant who came to Canada to escape imperial hardships, sprouts wings, and a wounded journalist bears witness to his transformation. Finally, past and present collide as a researcher reflects on the recent skinwars that have completely altered the world’s topography. Binding the stories together is an intersection of arrival and departure—in a quiet prairie town called Ezra.
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Under a Kabul Sky
$22.95Finalist, International Book Award for Multicultural Fiction.
These twelve short stories dive deep into imaginary worlds where everyday life is marked and marred by war. They speak of wounded love, captured women, confinement, talismans, borders, wolves. They give expression to the voices of Afghan women who would like to change the fate of people like Nâzboo, Khorshid, Hamid and so many others.
Originally published by Éditions Le Soupirail in 2019, this collection was the first volume of short stories by Afghan women to appear in France. This edition from Inanna Publications brings these stories-and their unique perspectives-to English-speaking readers for the first time. The collection includes stories by Wasima Badghisi, Batool Haidari, Alia Ataee, Sedighe Kazemi, Khaleda Khorsand, Masouma Kawsari, Mariam Mahboob, Toorpekai Qayum, Manizha Bakhtari, Homeira Qaderi, Parween Pazhwak and Homayra Rafat.
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Bramah and the Beggar Boy
$26.95One afternoon, in an old house in an abandoned village on the outskirts of Perimeter, in the place they call Pacifica, Bramah and the beggar boy find fragments of an ancient text in an oak box. Hunched over scraps of parchment and broken computer disks, they blow the dust off a cover, and so our story begins.Steeped in the tradition of fairy tales, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns (THOT J BAP) features a world in which a small band of resisters and survivors meet heartbreak and destruction with rhymes and resourceful skills such as soap and glass making, and a belief in the supernatural. Many things happen—some good, but most bad—including five eco-catastrophes and a viral bio-contagion. Shapeshifting in and out of it all is the nimble Bramah, a female locksmith, part human, part goddess—brown, brave and beautiful. Ten years in the making and described as “truly ambitious” by Stephen Collis, this work by award-winning poet Renée Sarojini Saklikar spans continents and centuries. Bramah and the Beggar Boy is the first instalment of the multi-part series.
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Grappling Hook
$19.95Taking its title from Tomas Transtr�mer, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang?s Grappling Hook sifts the debris of the twenty-first century for insights into identity, desire, and the everyday struggles inherent to motherhood. In doing so, she presents vivid portraits of the joys and perils of marriage, the evolving fight for social justice in a world divided by inequity, and the uncertain future thats?s left for children of the digital age. Grappling Hook is an impressive display of Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang?s considerable poetic gifts, and a love letter to those who are making meaningful change in unprecedented times.
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Personal Attention Roleplay
$18.95A young gymnast crushes on an older, more talented teammate while contending with her overworked mother. A newly queer twenty-something juggles two intimate relationships–with a slippery anarchist lover and an idiosyncratic meals-on-wheels recipient. A queer metal band’s summer tour unravels amid the sticky heat of the Northeastern US. A codependent listicle writer becomes obsessed with a Japanese ASMR channel.
The stories in Personal Attention Roleplay are propelled by queer loneliness, mixed-race confusion, late capitalist despondency, and the pitfalls of intimacy. Taking place in Montreal, Toronto, and elsewhere, they feature young Asian misfits struggling with the desire to see themselves reflected–in their surroundings, in others, online. Chau Bradley’s precise language and investigation of our more troubling motivations stand out in this wryly funny debut, through stories that hint at the uncanny while remaining grounded in the everyday.
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Help! I’m Alive
$22.95A powerfully emotional story of four people touched by a teen’s death, award-winning author Gurjinder Basran’s Help! I’m Alive is a clear-eyed exploration of meaningful connection in the modern era
After video footage of Jay’s death is shared on social media, a suburban Vancouver community is left to try to make sense of what happened to Jay and whether his death was an accident or a suicide.
Help! I’m Alive explores the aftermath through the eyes of four people all suddenly confronted with who they have been and how they should be in the wake of such loss. Jay’s former best friend, Ash, wonders what happened to their friendship and questions the relationships he has now; Winona, Jay’s troubled girlfriend struggles with guilt and abandonment; Anik, Ash’s older brother, is on a search for the meaning of life but hasn’t left his basement apartment in months; and Pavan, Ash and Anik’s mother, finds Jay’s death lays bare all her personal and maternal anxieties.
Unflinching but life-affirming, Help! I’m Alive is a Gen Z and Gen X coming-to-terms story about loneliness and connection, love and suffering, and the moments that bring us together and drive us apart.
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The Tales of Dwipa
$14.95***2023 IPPY AWARDS: MULTI CULTURAL NONFICTION – JUVENILE-YOUNG ADULT***
Through a framework of traditional tales, fantastic creatures struggle with issues of marginalization, opening discussion for parents and children in an accessible form.
The Tales Of Dwipa is a collection of short stories adapted from the Panchatantra, a collection of simple, engaging, and interrelated animal tales penned by Pandit Vishnu Sharma in the hopes of awakening the dim intelligence of a powerful Indian king’s idle sons. The ancient stories of the Panchatantra still find meaning in today’s world despite originating in India before 300 BCE. These stories are set in a Canadian context with topical themes, bringing together two distinct cultures—Indian and Canadian—for the most impressionable minds of our society.
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From the Shoreline
$20.00Steffi Tad-y’s debut collection brings forward diasporic experience as it intersects with mental illness. Family history and work lyrics occur against a tonal backdrop of the carceral. Yet Tad-y brings a tenderness to these fraught circumstances, finding beauty in detail and repetitive acts of love, in part due to the use of a multiplicity of forms that render a surplus of affect into beautiful images. Though danger properly exists in Tad-y’s world, her poetry takes its own advice in “Writer’s Archive”: “Look. Enough. Each full stop unspooling / the cardinal & bluebird privacy of things.”