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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 129–138 of 138 results
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Tonguebreaker
$18.95Finalist, Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
In their fourth collection of poetry, Lambda Literary Award-winning poet and writer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha continues her excavation of working-class queer brown femme survivorhood and desire.
Tonguebreaker is about surviving the unsurvivable: living through hate crimes, the suicides of queer kin, and the rise of fascism while falling in love and walking through your beloved’s neighbourhood in Queens. Building on her groundbreaking work in Bodymap, Tonguebreaker is an unmitigated force of disabled queer-of-colour nature, narrating disabled femme-of-colour moments on the pulloff of the 80 in West Oakland, the street, and the bed. Tonguebreaker dreams unafraid femme futures where we live — a ritual for our collective continued survival.
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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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undercurrent
$18.95The water belongs to itself. undercurrent reflects on the power and sacredness of water—largely underappreciated by too many—whether it be in the form of ocean currents, the headwaters of the Fraser River or fluids in the womb. Exploring a variety of poetic forms, anecdote, allusion and visual elements, this collection reminds humanity that we are water bodies, and we need and deserve better ways of honouring this.
Poet Rita Wong approaches water through personal, cultural and political lenses. She humbles herself to water both physically and spiritually: “i will apprentice myself to creeks & tributaries, groundwater & glaciers / listen for the salty pulse within, the blood that recognizes marine ancestry.” She witnesses the contamination of First Nations homelands and sites, such as Gregoire Lake near Fort McMurray, AB: “though you look placid, peaceful dibenzothiophenes / you hold bitter, bitumized depths.” Wong points out that though capitalism and industry are supposed to improve our quality of life, they’re destroying the very things that give us life in the first place. Listening to and learning from water is key to a future of peace and creative potential.
undercurrent emerges from the Downstream project, a multifaceted, creative collaboration that highlights the importance of art in understanding and addressing the cultural and political issues related to water. The project encourages public imagination to respect and value water, ecology and sustainability. Visit downstream.ecuad.ca.
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Valley of the Rats
$13.95Book nerd Krish hates the outdoors, and camping. But especially germs. When Krish and his father, Kabir, take a camping trip to Ladakh, he convinces himself that they will bond, despite their differences.
When they’re lost in a bamboo forest, teeming with black rats, and germs, Krish is at an all-time low. His GF (gut feel) and a couple of rats lead them to a hidden village, Imdur, unmarked on any map.
Krish and his father are allowed to stay, only if they follow rules. But Krish soon realizes the village has an odd custom of worshipping rats. They also have a secret. And so does his dad. Turns out, Krish has a secret too.
When all the secrets explode into the open, Krish and Kabir are in grave danger. Can Krish overcome his fears and phobias to take the chance offered to him? Or are he and his dad doomed to spend the rest of their lives among rats?
Krish hates the outdoors, camping, and especially germs. When Krish and his father take a camping trip to Ladakh, he convinces himself they?ll bond, despite their differences.
When they?re lost in a bamboo forest teeming with black rats, and germs, Krish is at an all-time low. His gut feel and a couple of rats lead them to Imdur, a hidden village.
Krish and his father are allowed to stay, if they follow the rules. But when Krish and Kabir break the most sacred rule, the Imdura threaten to keep them there forever. Can Krish overcome his fears to save them?
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What Is Written on the Tongue
$24.95For readers of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, a transportive historical novel about finding morality in the throes of war and colonizationReleased from Nazi forced labor as World War II ends, 20-year-old Sam is quickly drafted and sent to the island of Java to help regain control of the colony. But the Indonesian independence movement is far ahead of the Dutch, and Sam is thrown into a guerilla war, his loyalties challenged when his squad commits atrocities reminiscent of those he suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Sam falls in love with both Sari and the beautiful island she calls home, but as he loses friends to sniper fire and jungle malady, he also loses sight of what he wants most — to be a good man.
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Where Things Touch
$20.00Finalist for the 2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award
To devote oneself to the study of beauty is to offer footnotes to the universe for all the places and all the moments that one observes beauty. I can no longer grab beauty by her wrists and demand articulation or meaning. I can only take account of where things touch.
Part lyric essay, part prose poetry, Where Things Touch grapples with the manifold meanings and possibilities of beauty.
Drawing on her experiences as a physician-in-training, Orang considers clinical encounters and how they relate to the concept and very idea of beauty. Such considerations lead her to questions about intimacy, queerness, home, memory, love, and other aspects of human existence. Throughout, beauty is ultimately imagined as something inextricably tied to care: the care of lovers, of patients, of art and literature, and the various non-human worlds that surround us.
Eloquent and meditative in its approach, beauty, here, beyond base expectations of frivolity and superficiality, is conceived of as a thing to recover.Where Things Touch is an exploration of an essential human pleasure, a necessary freedom by which to challenge what we know of ourselves and the world we inhabit.
2021 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award Jury Citation:
“Tapestry-like in form, Orang’s lyrical poetic essay stitches together an exploration of beauty and aesthetics that is woven with humility and relationality to other. Her immense sense of craft and confidence make for breath stopping moments, over and over, while at the same time filling the senses with powerful and piercing revelation. ‘Reading,’ she writes, ‘is a kind of ecological activity’– and it is a privilege to situate yourself within Orang’s topographies of love.”
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Woman Life Freedom
$25.00This international anthology marks a world-historical moment: the first ever feminist revolution. The slogan chanted by the demonstrators in Iran is Woman, Life, Freedom, and it encompasses hopes and ideals for all people everywhere. This anthology echoes that cry. The poems here might be reflections on the present moment, denunciations of injustice, examinations of the poet’s own conscience, laments for the fallen, bitter curses, prayers, celebrations of life, and visions of a better future. Bänoo and Cy aim to raise awareness of the women’s revolution in Iran and show the world that this cause is alive and will not be put down.
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You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked.
$20.00Finalist for the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
Finalist for the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award
Longlisted for CBC Canada Reads 2021
A Globe and Mail Best Book Debut of 2020A young translator living in Toronto frequently travels abroad—to Hong Kong, Macau, Prague, Tokyo—often with his unnamed lover. In restaurants and hotel rooms, the couple begin telling folk tales to each other, perhaps as a way to fill the undefined space between them. Theirs is a comic and enigmatic relationship in which emotions are often muted and sometimes masked by verbal play and philosophical questions, and further complicated by the woman’s frequent unexplained disappearances.
You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked. is an intimate novel of memory and longing that challenges Western tropes and Orientalism. Embracing the playful surrealism of Haruki Murakami and the atmospheric narratives of filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, Sheung-King’s debut is at once lyrical and punctuated, and wholly unique, and marks the arrival of a bold new voice in Canadian literature.
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You Cannot Turn Away
$24.95This book provides, for the first time, a bilingual edition of poetry by R Cheran. These 40 poems cover a range of experiences, including love, war, despair, hope, and diaspora. Cheran is considered one of the finest contemporary poets in Tamil. Both modernist and unfailingly lyrical, his work is a remarkable blend of tradition and innovation. The forty poems in this volume have been translated and introduced by Chelva Kanaganayakam.
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我的名是张欣恩 (Gimme chance leh)
$19.95Kris, a young diasporic Chinese woman, attempts to reconcile her upbringing between Canada and Singapore. In doing so, she comes face to face with herself as she pulls apart the tactics she uses in an attempt to fit into two wildly different cultures. Weaving in and out of English, Mandarin, and Singlish, Kris uses storytelling to navigate beauty standards, body image, family, food, and an unexpected friendship with a Chicken Rice Uncle.
Deftly unravelling stereotypes and addressing the universal through Kris’s determined persistence and heartwarming sense of humour, 我的名是张欣恩 (Gimme chance leh) is about celebrating difference and existing in the in-between.