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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 97–112 of 128 results
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The Fish Eyes Trilogy
$24.95Three coming-of-age solo shows that follow the lives of teenage girls who attend the same high school and process their real-life dilemmas through dance, while exploring the heartaches of youth and the meaning of heritage.
Fish Eyes is the story of Meena, a classically trained Indian dancer who, despite being obsessed with Bollywood movies and her dance career, just wants to be like the rest of her high-school friends. When she develops a massive crush on Buddy, the popular boy at school, Meena contemplates turning down an incredible opportunity to pursue him, even if he barely notices her.
Boys With Cars follows Naz, also a classically trained Indian dancer, who dreams of getting out of small town Port Moody to attend the University of British Columbia. But when Buddy causes a stir over Naz at school, Naz’s university plans begin to crumble quickly.
Let Me Borrow That Top centres on Candice, a girl who appropriates Meena’s Indian dance skills and bullies Naz after a nasty rumour spreads through the halls of their high school. But like her two enemies, Candice shares a passion for Indian dancing, and has just been accepted to the Conventry School of Bhangra. Will she leave behind the comforts of home to pursue her dreams?
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The Forbidden Purple City
$22.95Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award 2019
A man returns to Hoi An in his retirement to compose a poem honouring his parents. Two teenagers, ostracized in a private school, forge an unlikely bond. A son discovers the truth about his father’s business ventures and his dreams of success. A young bride, isolated on a remote island with her new husband, finds community in a group of abalone divers.
Taking the title for his debut collection of short fiction from the walled palace of Vietnam’s Nguyen dynasty, Philip Huynh dives headfirst into the Vietnamese diaspora. In these beautifully crafted stories, crystalline in their clarity and immersive in their intensity, he creates a universe inhabited by the deprivations of war, the reinvention of self in a new and unfamiliar settings, and the tensions between old-world parents and new-world children. Rooted in history and tradition yet startlingly contemporary in their approach, Huynh’s stories are sensuously evocative, plunging us into worlds so all-encompassing that we can smell the scent of orange blossoms and hear the rumble of bass lines from suburban car stereos.
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The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak
$20.00The poems in The Language We Were Never Taught to Speak explore the many identities, both visible and invisible, that a body contains. With influences from pop culture, the Bible, tech, and Hong-Kongese history, these pieces reflect and reveal how the stories of immigrants in Canada hold both universal truths and singular distinctions. From boybands that show the way to become “the kind of girl a girl could love” to “rich flavours that are just a few generations of poverty away,” they invite the reader to meditate on spirituality, food, and the shapes love takes.
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The Lantern and the Night Moths
$23.95the lantern light seems to have written a poem;
they feel lonesome since i won’t read them.
—“lantern” by Fei MingThe work of Tang Dynasty Classical Chinese poets such as Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei has long been celebrated in both China and internationally, and various English translations and mistranslations of their work played a pivotal yet often unacknowledged role in shaping the emergence and evolution of modern Anglophone poetry.
In The Lantern and the Night Moths, Chinese diaspora poet-translator Yilin Wang has selected and translated poems by five of China’s most innovative modern and contemporary poets: Qiu Jin, Fei Ming, Dai Wangshu, Zhang Qiaohui, and Xiao Xi. Expanding on and subverting the long lineage of Classical Chinese poetry that precedes them, their work can be read collectively as a series of ars poeticas for modern Sinophone poetry.
Wang’s translations are featured alongside the original Chinese texts, and accompanied by Wang’s personal essays reflecting on the art, craft, and labour of poetry translation. Together, these poems and essays chart the development of a myriad of modernist poetry traditions in China that parallel, diverge from, and sometimes intersect with their Anglophone and Western counterparts.
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The Legacy of Tiananmen Square
$29.95With the loosening of restrictions on the Chinese economy in the 1980s and 1990s and the rise of the middle class, many observers thought that Western-style democracy would soon follow. Instead, China has adopted its own version, with a market-driven economy where actions that might call into question the decisions of the governing party are strictly forbidden.
In this fascinating account, Cormier chronicles numerous failed attempts to bring democracy to China in the last century, starting with a handful of brave souls who tried to move China towards a constitutional monarchy at the turn of the century and peaking with the student uprising of 1989. Using historical research (including surprising transcripts from Party meetings) and candid interviews with many of the dissidents — some now living in exile, others under house arrest in China — Cormier tells the very human story of real people struggling for human rights and freedoms.
The Legacy of Tiananmen Square was originally published in French as Les héritiers de Tiananmen. This updated edition was translated by Jonathan Kaplansky.
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The Legend of Baraffo
$23.00In Baraffo, a town gripped by revolutionary fervour, a boy named Mazzu grapples to understand the motivations of Babello, a man imprisoned for an act of arson. When Babello begins a hunger strike and another building is set ablaze, tensions mount among the citizens and Mazzu considers a risky solution.
Within an extraordinary world, this sweeping and mythical story asks prescient questions about the nature of social change: is it better accelerated by those who seek total transformation or attained by those trying to work within the system?
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The Long Burnout
$19.95The Long Burnout is the poetic chronicle of a doctor’s burnout, beginning with and continuing past the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course, burnout is a primary concern facing the medical profession today, and probably all of society. The anxiety created by the virus and its endless variants was amplified by difficulties in caring for people, preexisting pressures, and ever-worsening resource scarcities. And, when things seemed darkest, the author suffered the loss of his father, which added grieving to the ordeal. However, a slow process of recovery began thereafter, thanks to a supportive family, exercise and healthy habits, the catharsis of writing, and the tincture of time. These poems express a year of suffering and healing playing out among existential contexts, our place in a world which we are degrading, and a universe we still can’t understand. If only we could reverse our own civilization’s long burnout to achieve a respectful state of equilibrium with our surroundings: homeostasis, biologically, or the Buddhist idea of Oneness with the world.
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The Red One
$22.95Nisha, “Azar’s beautiful wife,” lives a life surrounded by all the modern luxuries of a wealthy suburban home in Toronto. Her father is a taxi driver, her mother a conservative religious housewife jealously craving a better material life. Tormented by her childhood memories of serial sexual abuse by a family friend, contemptuous of the lies lived by her circle of fake friends, Nisha is unwilling to have a child by her dominant, patronizing husband. She finds escape in mindless shopping sprees and secretly spirals into an addiction to a drug called the “red powder.” In this state one day she meets the mysterious Red One, an archetypal strong man to whom she’s instantly and dangerously attracted, who promises her release from her pain. But is he real or a figment of her fervid imagination? In a thrilling denouement to the novel she finds the answer.
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The Road Between Us
$23.95A lover’s knot of a novel that spans continents and decades, The Road Between Us delves into the entangled lives of its ensemble cast.
Estela, a lawyer, struggles professionally after a deep childhood loss and an ill-advised undergraduate dalliance. Ash is a diplomat posted to Buenos Aires and Beijing who wants what he can’t have. Ophélie, a nurse, makes a grievous medical error that alters the course of her life. And Roman is an academic whose careless sexual escapades after a painful divorce lead to even more painful consequences.
Tense, poetic, and as binge-worthy as a miniseries, The Road Between Us explores why we make the decisions we do, and how those decisions affect the people we love.
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The Shadow List
$18.00In these devastating lyric poems Jen Sookfong Lee unfolds the experience of her narrator, following her through frost-chilled nights and salt-scented days, as she pulls at the knot of accumulated expectations around her trying to create space to want and to be. The Shadow List is a book filled with desire, where we question the politics of who gets to choose and who doesn’t and where the narrator creates hidden lists of what she really wants. With a novelist’s way with character, Lee builds a deep connection with the narrator of the poems, yet each individual poem creates a vivid snapshot of moments many will recognize. The slick of black ice, the killing light of day, the cheap, plastic diamonds – they are all pieces of a life we gather and put in our pockets to remember with.
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The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us
$22.00The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us is an anthology of fascinating and singular short stories from some of the best Chinese Canadian authors writing today.
Assembled by Dan K. Woo, who was named a Canadian author to watch by CBC in 2022, the stories in the anthology span a wide variety of Chinese Canadian voices, experiences and styles. The collection has contributions from established writers such Sam Cheuk, Sheung-King and Lydia Kwa; up-and-coming voices such as Isabella Wang and even a story available for the first time in English from Bingji Ye. From the practiced fielding of family questions by young women in a Hong Kong living room to a child’s ghost searching for a way to move to the next world to a family living with the unsettling sounds of constant explosions an industrial district on the edges of Beijing, each story is a stunning window into a world new to many North American readers. The Spirits Have Nothing to Do with Us is a powerful and elegant collection of stories that works to redefine Chinese Canadian writing.
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The Subtweet
$21.952021 Dublin Literary Award Finalist
2021 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist for Transgender Fiction
2020 Toronto Book Awards Finalist“The Subtweet is affecting, unnerving, empowering, and often truly LOL.” — Foreword Reviews, starred review
“A beautifully crafted novel about race, music, and social media.” — Booklist
Includes an exclusive free soundtrack
Celebrated multidisciplinary artist Vivek Shraya’s second novel is a no-holds-barred examination of the music industry, social media, and making art in the modern era, shining a light on the promise and peril of being seen.
Indie musician Neela Devaki has built a career writing the songs she wants to hear but nobody else is singing. When one of Neela’s songs is covered by internet artist RUK-MINI and becomes a viral sensation, the two musicians meet and a transformative friendship begins. But before long, the systemic pressures that pit women against one another begin to bear down on Neela and RUK-MINI, stirring up self-doubt and jealousy. With a single tweet, their friendship implodes, a career is destroyed, and the two women find themselves at the centre of an internet firestorm.
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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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The Tiger Flu
$23.95WINNER, Lambda Literary Award
In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai — her first in sixteen years — a community of parthenogenic women, sent into exile by patriarchal and corporate Salt Water City, go to war against disease, technology, and an economic system that threatens them with extinction.
Kirilow is a doctor apprentice whose lover, Peristrophe, is a “starfish,” a woman who can regenerate her own limbs and organs, which she uses to help her clone sisters whose organs are failing. When a denizen from Salt Water City suffering from a mysterious flu comes into their midst, Peristrophe becomes infected and dies, prompting Kirilow to travel to the city, where the flu is now a pandemic, to find a new starfish who will help save her sisters. There, Kirilow meets Kora, a girl-woman desperate to save her family from the epidemic. Kora has everything Kirilow is looking for, except the will to abandon her own family. But before Kirilow can convince her, both are kidnapped by a mysterious group of men to serve as test subjects for a new technology that can cure the mind of the body.
Bold, beautiful, and wildly imaginative, The Tiger Flu is at once a saga of two women heroes, a cyberpunk thriller, and a convention-breaking cautionary tale — a striking metaphor for our complicated times.
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The Unravelling of Ou
$21.95Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support. On what should be one of the happiest days ever, the day her granddaughter is born, Minoo is faced with a terrible choice: make a clean break from her constant companion, a sock puppet named Ecology Paul, or lose her daughter and granddaughter, and maybe all of the people she loves. On an emotional drive home from the hospital, Ecology Paul shares the story of how Minoo got to this point, recalling Minoo’s early teenage pregnancy in Iran, her exile to Canada, her questions about her sexuality, and how a ragtag sock puppet came to her when she desperately needed to be seen. Full of imagination, whimsy and heart, The Unravelling of Ou follows Minoo’s struggles to justify the puppet’s existence and eventually, untangle herself from her dependence on it and reconnect with the people she loves.
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The Walking Boy
$19.95The Walking Boy is a quest novel set in early eighth-century Tang Dynasty China, in the final days of the rule of the first Female Emperor Wu Zhao. The ailing hermit monk Harelip sends his disciple Baoshi on a pilgrimage from Mount Hua to Chang’an, the Western capital; Baoshi is the “walking boy” charged with locating Harelip’s missing former lover Ardhanari. Baoshi lives with a secret only his Master knows, and he is filled with fears of being discovered. On his journey, Baoshi crosses paths with both commoners and imperial officials, as well as others who take delight in their queer identities; in doing so, he is released powerfully from his past shame.
The Walking Boy, set in the years following Kwa’s recent novel Oracle Bone, is a book of quiet subversion, upending classical Chinese tropes with contemporary ideas around gender and feminism. Filled with psychological complexities, magic and poetic allusions to classical Chinese literature, The Walking Boy explores the intrigue of inner alchemy while exorcising the ghosts of history.