Happy APA Heritage Month!

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

May is APA Heritage Month, and I'd like to invite everyone to share their favorite APA books, stories, poems, authors, etc. If you had to pick one or two books by APA authors to introduce a friend to the literature, what would they be?

A couple of my favorites are:

Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night: A beautifully written novel about a "madwoman" on a Caribbean island in the context of English colonialism and the South Asian diaspora. The nested narrative structure is wonderful to get lost in, featuring a gay male nurse who makes a connection with the woman and learns about her story.

Kenji Yoshino's Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights: I credit this memoir/legal analysis as one of a couple books (including Jane Jeong Trenka's The Language of Blood) that broke me of my aversion to memoirs. In addition to being a poetic account of Yoshino's sense of his queer self, the book also offers an insightful discussion of legal frameworks for anti-discrimination protection. Yoshino argues that these frameworks ultimately homogenize behavior and normalize identities.

How about you? Feel free to comment in reply to this post or create your own post this month!

Comments

[jailbaitjello.livejournal.com]

I think Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake is still my pick for all-time. But then again, my friends tend to be college-age to mid-twenties Asian Americans, so I think there's a greater chance that the book would resonate with them.

[pylduck.livejournal.com]

I still need to read that one! I'm such a bad fan. :/ And I need to watch the movie version, too. I love all adaptations, good and bad.

[jailbaitjello.livejournal.com]

I thought the movie adaptation was a bit disjointed. While I think it was good in capturing the immigrant/second-gen transition, I don't think it captured what was for me the essence of the book: the tensions and conflicts of the characters' shifting identities.

But yeah, highly recommend the book. I might actually reread it again.

[skim666.livejournal.com]

Min Song has a good reading of _The Namesake_ in the "After Postmodernism" special issue of the journal Twentieth-Century Literature.

also, i haven't seen the movie, but will -- i love kumar! :D

[skim666.livejournal.com]

Ted Chiang's short stories in "Stories of Your Life" -- most amazing literary sci fi ever!

Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories in "Interpreter of Maladies" -- devastatingly wonderful short stories

Lynsley Tenorio's short stories in "Monstress" -- also devastatingly wonderful short stories

Sesshu Foster's novel _Atomik Aztex_ -- when I taught it this past semester, I couldn't read passages out loud in class without giggling at its perverse brilliance

Loung Ung's memoir _First They Killed My Father_ -- I'm actually going to teach her 2nd memoir, _Lucky Child_, in my as am lit class in the fall, but the 1st one, the story of her actual experiences during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror, was RIVETING. I could NOT put it down! Also, I generally have no feelings (except angrrrs!) but it actually made me cry.

[skim666.livejournal.com]

ok wait i think i'm liking Lucky Child better the more i think about it.

[stephenhongsohn.livejournal.com]

tough question, but since it would be an introduction to asian american literature, i might do something that combines genre fiction with asian american historical elements...

hmmmmm, maybe something like Suki Kim's The Interpreter (a great sort of hard-boiled read)


Another go-to text for me has always been Lan Samantha Chang's Hunger: A Novella and Stories (taught numerous times).