Search results for ""kaya press""

A coming-of-age tale of dislocation and inherited trauma from the acclaimed young French Vietnamese novelist French Vietnamese writer Line Papin’s stunning English-language debut, The Girl Before Her offers a window onto the existential anguish of displacement as experienced by a child on the cusp of becoming a woman. Uprooted without explanation from the sunshine and chaos of Hà Nội at the age of ten, the narrator finds herself adrift in the unfamiliar, gray world of France and grappling with a deep sense of uncertainty about who she is and where she belongs. Lacking the words to express her growing sense of alienation, she stops talking, then eating. She is hospitalized and almost dies from anorexia. Part meditation, part family history, part message in a bottle to her younger selves, Papin’s lyrical work of autofiction explores what it takes to embrace one’s multiracial, transnational self by making peace with the generations of women who’ve come before. The Girl Before Her is the first book to be published by Ink & Blood, a new joint imprint from Kaya Press and the Diasporic Vietnamese Artist Network (DVAN), which aims to bring Vietnamese literary voices from across the globe to English readers.

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A visual history of the role that religious teachings, practices and communities played in the WWII Japanese American experience, with essays by leading scholars Accompanying the Japanese American National Museum's 2022 eponymous exhibition, Sutra and Bible: Faith and the Japanese American World War II Incarceration explores the role that religious teachings, practices and communities played while Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II. From the confines of concentration camps and locales under martial law to the battlegrounds of Europe, Japanese Americans drew on their faith to survive forced removal, indefinite incarceration, unjust deportation, family separation, military service and resettlement at a time when their race and religion were seen as threats to national security. Coedited by Emily Anderson and Duncan Ryuken Williams, Sutra and Bible weaves visual storytelling with auxiliary essays from 32 prominent voices across academic, arts and social justice communities. Contributors include: Michihiro Ama, Brooks Andrews, Anne M. Blankenship, Joanne Doi MM, Laura (Kitaji) Dominguez-Yon, Timothy Wagner, Kristen Hayashi, Jay Hirabayashi, Naomi Hirahara, Mitch Honma, Satsuki Ina, Jane Naomi Iwamura, Mas Kodani, Mark Nakagawa, Wendy Egyoku Nakao, Elizabeth Nishiura, Togo Nishiura, Nancy Kyoko Oda, Gene Oishi, Gail Okawa, Dakota Russell, Bacon Sakatani, Candice Shibata, Brandon Shimoda, George Tanabe, Todd Tsuchiya, Nancy Ukai, Jonathan van Harmelen, Karen Tei Yamashita and Mikoto Yoshida.

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Jenny Liou’s debut poetry collection conjoins the world of cage fighting and the traumas of immigration In Muscle Memory, Washington-based poet Jenny Liou grapples with violence and identity, beginning with the chain-link enclosure of the prizefighter’s cage and radiating outward into the diasporic sweep of Chinese American history. Liou writes with spare, stunning lyricism about how cage fighting offered relief from the trauma inflicted by diaspora’s vanishing ghosts; how, in the cage, an elbow splits an eyebrow, or an armbar snaps a limb, and, even when you lose a fight, you’ve won something: pain. Liou places the physical manifestation of violence in her sport alongside the deeper traumas of immigration and her own complicated search for identity, exploring what she inherited from her Chinese immigrant father—who was also obsessed with poetry and martial arts. When she finally steps away from the cage to raise children of her own, Liou begins to question how violence and history pass from one generation to the next, and whether healing is possible without forgetting. Jenny Liou (born 1983) is an English professor at Pierce College and a retired professional cage fighter. She lives and writes in Covington, Washington.

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In Accomplice to Memory, Q.M. Zhang pieces together the mystery of her father’s exodus from China to the US during the two decades of civil and world war leading up to the 1949 revolution. But after a lifetime of her father’s secrets and lies, Zhang’s efforts to untangle the truth are thwarted by the distance between generations and her father’s growing dementia. One day, late in his life, Zhang’s father tells her a story she never heard before, and suddenly, all of his previous stories begin to unravel. Before she can get clarity on the new information, her father is hospitalized. Armed with history books and timelines, Zhang sits at her father’s bedside recording accounts of love, espionage and betrayal, attempting to parse out the truth. Part memoir, novel and historical documentary, this hybrid text explores the silences and subterfuge of an immigrant parent, and the struggles of the second generation to understand the first. Q.M. Zhang is a Professor of Cultural Psychology at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.

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In locations ranging from the archives of Imperial China to a rare book shop in Mexico City, a Chinese American historian discovers six anonymous documents in Spanish and Chinese, and constructs them into a years-long correspondence between the Chinese Emperor Wanli and Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote. Utilizing his vast historical knowledge and linguistic abilities, the historian draws connections across the disparate geography of the 17th century. As in his acclaimed previous novel, The Beginning of the East, Max Yeh remaps literary conventions, sending ripples through the idea of historical fiction in the vein of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Max Yeh (born 1937) has taught at the University of California, Irvine, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and New Mexico State University. He lives in the New Mexico mountains with his wife and daughter, where he works on a wide range of subjects including literary theory, linguistics, art history and science.

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Kazim Ali’s wildly inventive novel The Secret Room asks: how does one create a life of meaning in the face of loneliness and alienation from one’s own family, culture or even sense of self? In the space of a single day, the lives of four people converge and diverge in ways they themselves may not even measure. Sonia Chang, a violinist, prepares for a concert. Rizwan Syed, a yoga teacher, makes one last panicked attempt at reconciliation with his family. Jody Merchant tries to balance a stressful work life with a dream she abandoned long ago. Pratap Patel trudges through his life trying to ignore the pain he still feels at old losses. The experiences of these four characters, woven together in the manner of a string quartet, together create a raw, fluid composition. Kazim Ali (born 1971) is an American poet, novelist, essayist and professor. Born in the UK to parents of Indian descent, and raised in Canada and the US, Ali is an assistant professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. He cofounded the independent press Nightboat Books.

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Mimi Lok's Last of Her Name is an eye-opening story collection about the intimate, interconnected lives of diasporic women and the histories they are born into. Set in a wide range of time periods and locales, including '80s UK suburbia, WWII Hong Kong and contemporary urban California, the book features an eclectic cast of outsiders: among them, an elderly housebreaker, wounded lovers and kung-fu fighting teenage girls. Last of Her Name offers a meditation on female desire and resilience, family and the nature of memory.Mimi Lok is a Chinese writer and editor. Born and raised in the UK, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in McSweeney's, Lucky Peach, Nimrod and Hyphen, among other publications. She is the cofounder, Executive Director and Editor of Voice of Witness, an award-winning nonprofit that illuminates human rights issues through an oral-history book series (published by Haymarket and Verso) and a national education program.A mesmerizing and deeply felt debut that affirms all that is great about short fiction. 'The Woman In the Closet' has to be considered a new classic. Lok's collection brings startling intimacy to her characters, all of them struggling with dislocation and belonging within the Chinese diaspora. I can't think of a collection that better speaks to this moment of global movement and collective rupture from homes and history, and the struggle to find meaning despite it all. Dave Eggers

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Bridgeable Shores: Selected Poems and New (1969-2001) is the first U.S. publication of the work of the revered Filipino-American poet Luis Cabalquinto. This long overdue collection features the compassion, wisdom and well-being gained from the mulit-ethnic worlds the author inhabits. Comprising four sections in total, it is the first two that form the heart of the book: "Morningland," which features poems inspired by the Philippines, and "Sun on Ice," inspired by New York. By choosing this structure of two separate but "bridgeable" shores, Cabalquinto embodies the expatriate Filipino as poet and celebrates the possibility of crosscultural harmony.

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Lydia's Funeral Video is a one-woman play written and performed by Sam Chanse, a playwright and performer based in New York and California. In this apocalyptic satire, devout bank clerk Lydia Clark-Lin has 28 days to terminate an unplanned pregnancy, shoot her own funeral video and do some standup comedy. As the camera rolls and Lydia gamely sets about her grim task, a story emerges that is at once hilarious and unnerving. This publication unites the full theater script of Lydia's Funeral Video with a new counterpoint narrative and stream-of-consciousness illustrations that enhance this dynamic realization of a live theater experience in book form. Also included are notes and an essay about the origins and development of the piece, as well as a special mini-flipbook. Seamlessly weaving in questions of race, gender identity and more existential questions, Lydia's Funeral Video is bold, unpredictable storytelling at its inventive and unsettling best.

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An intimate telling of the life and times of teenage Korean revolutionary Kim San First published in 1941 and long unavailable, Song of Arirang tells the true story of Korean revolutionary Kim San (Jang Jirak), who left colonized Korea as a teenager to fight against Japanese imperialism and fought alongside Mao's Red Army during the Chinese Revolution. This remarkably intimate memoir (as told to the American journalist Nym Wales, aka Helen Foster Snow) brings to vivid life some of the most dramatic events of the period. With its first-hand account of early 20th-century guerilla insurgency and radical cross-pollination, this rare, behind-the-scenes look into what Wales describes as "the psyche of a dedicated and thoughtful revolutionary" gives voice to the brutality, betrayal and alliances that rocked East Asia at the beginning of the last century and continue to shape the region—and the world—today. Kaya's edition of Song of Arirang includes the writings (both literary and in essay form) of Kim San himself, translated into English for the first time ever, as well as contextualizing notes by George Totten and an introduction by Arif Dirlik. Kim San (Jang Jirak, 1905–37) left his family in Korea as a teenager and crossed the border into China, where he joined Mao's Red Army. A participant in or witness to some of the most critical events of the Chinese Revolution, he became a leader in the fight against Japanese colonial rule, and was executed in China in 1937. He was awarded a posthumous "Patriot" award by the South Korean government in 2005. Born in Cedar City, Utah, Helen Foster Snow (1907–97) moved to China in 1931 and reported extensively on the Chinese Revolution, the Korean independence movement and the Sino-Japanese War. Writing under the pseudonym of Nym Wales, she wrote and published over 40 books, including Inside Red China, My China Years: A Memoir and Song of Ariran. In 1993, she was awarded the first China Writer's Association award, and in 1996, she became the first American ever to be honored as a Friendship Ambassador by the Chinese government.

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"You're not allowed to have a girlfriend until college, my mother warned. And you'd better get into an Ivy League school!David Tung Can't Get a Girlfriend Unless He Gets into an Ivy League College is the first official young adult novel from Ed Lin, author of the acclaimed novels Waylaid and This Is a Bust. Humorous and socially complex, the book tells the story of an Asian American New Jersey high-school student as he navigates multiple social circles as well as parental pressures to get As and conform to cultural norms and expectations. Amid these pressures from outside is the fear he will die alone, whether he gets into Harvard or not.Exploring class tensions (for example, regular school in an upscale, Asian-majority suburb versus weekend Chinese school in working-class Chinatown) and contemporary social neuroses, David Tung Can't Get a Girlfriend is an already hotly anticipated book from an author whose debut novel, Waylaid, established him as a pioneering, provocative, welcome new voice in young adult fiction.Ed Lin (born 1969), a journalist by training, is the author of several award-winning books, including: Waylaid, his literary debut; the Robert Chow crime series, set in 1970s Manhattan Chinatown (This Is a Bust, Snakes Can't Run and One Red Bastard); and the Taipei Night Market crime series (Ghost Month, Incensed and 99 Ways to Die). Lin is the first author to win three Asian American Literary Awards. He lives in New York with his wife, actress Cindy Cheung, and his son Walter.

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Named one of 5 Writers Under 35 by National Book Foundation, 2019 Blending elements of memoir and sports writing, Anelise Chen’s debut novel is an experimental work that perhaps most resembles what the ancient Greeks called hyponemata, or “notes to the self,” in the form of observations, reminders and self-exhortations. Taken together, these notes constitute a personal handbook on “how to live”––or perhaps more urgently “why to live,” a question the narrator, graduate student Athena Chen, desperately needs answering. When Chen hears news that her brilliant friend from college has committed suicide, she is thrown into a fugue of fear and doubt. Through anecdotes and close readings of moments in the sometimes harrowing world of sports, the novel questions the validity of our current narratives of success. Anelise Chen earned her BA in English from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Fiction from NYU. Her fiction, essays and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Gawker, NPR and elsewhere. She currently teaches writing at Columbia University.

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Crevasse, Hong Kong–based writer Nicholas Wong's newest collection of poetry, which won the 2016 Lamda Literary Award, starts with an epigraph from Maurice Merleau-Ponty that notes the impossibility of observing one's own physical body and, therefore, the necessity of a "second," "unobservable" body from which to view one's own. The poems in Crevasse seek to uncover the thread connecting these mutually observed and observing bodies. Like Samuel Beckett and others before him, Wong has deliberately chosen to write in a non-native language—English, his second language after Cantonese. Freed from the assumptions and conventions of his mother tongue, Wong strips down, interrogates and ultimately reorients the fragmented complexities of the multiple communities he inhabits—queer, Asian, poet, reader, lover—in a collection of poems that exposes the gap between familiarity and the inevitable distance of the body.

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Waylaid is the story of a Chinese American boy who struggles to grow up in the grip of an overcharged sexual environment. With a daily routine that involves renting out rooms to johns and hookers at his parents' sleazy hotel, the narrator loses his grip on concepts of friendship, family and childhood. As he pursues his all-consuming quest to lose his virginity, issues of race, class and sex cripple his sense of self-worth. It is a story told with a Gen-X-style bleak humor that doesn't pander to conventional notions of immigrant narrative. Waylaid doesn't cut a wide swath through Asian American literature. It is a switchblade in the gut to stories of over-achievement and success in America that ignore the human cost.

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Brawling, street-wise prose poems push the boundaries of narrative form, taking the reader through the physical and psychological landscapes of East Los Angeles.

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A furious, multiform examination of the devastation wrought by anti-Asian racism in America Truong Tran’s provocative collection of poetry, prose and essays is a stunning rebuttal to the idea of anti-Asian racism as a victimless crime. Written with a compulsion for lucidity that transforms outrage into clarity, Book of the Other resists the luxury of metaphor to write about the experience of being shut out, shut down and othered as a queer, working-class teacher, immigrant and refugee. What emerges from Tran’s sharp-eyed experiments in language and form is an achingly beautiful acknowledgment of the estrangement from self forced upon those seduced by the promise of color-blind acceptance and the rigorous, step by step act of recollection needed to find one's way home to oneself. Truong Tran was born in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1969. He is the author of six previous collections of poetry, The Book of Perceptions, Placing the Accents, Dust and Conscience, Within the Margins, Four Letter Words and 100 words (coauthored with Damon Potter). He also authored the children’s book Going Home Coming Home, and an artist monograph, I Meant to Say Please Pass the Sugar. He is the recipient of the Poetry Center Prize, the Fund for Poetry Grant, the California Arts Council Grant and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission Grants. Tran lives in San Francisco where he teaches art and poetry.

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Lament in the Night collects two remarkable novellas by the author Shosun Nagahara, translated from the Japanese for the first time. The title novella, originally published in 1925, follows itinerant day laborer Ishikawa Sazuko as he prowls the back alleys and bathhouses of Los Angeles, looking for a meal, a job or just someone to hold onto. The second novella follows a young mother working her way through bars and nightclubs after being abandoned by her gambling-addicted husband. Written in a deadpan tone that is both evocative and precise, this dazzling exercise in 1920s naturalist noir promises to become a classic of American literature. This first-ever English language publication of Lament in the Night opens up a whole realm of American literature that has been woefully underpublished and unexplored--namely, the literary heritage of non-English-speaking immigrants in America. Nagahara was influenced by many Western writers--especially Knut Hamsun, whose work he translated into Japanese--and his novels combine the gritty sensibility of Los Angeles noir with elements of Japanese traditional storytelling and epistolary techniques.

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Hari Alluri has been described by US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera as a writer who "carries a new, quiet brush of multi-currents, of multi-worlds to paint this holographic life-scape." In The Flayed City, he offers an intimate look into the lives of city dwellers and immigrants in a collection of charged poems that sweep together "an archipelago song" scored by memory and landscape, history and mythology, desire and loss. Driven by what is residual—displacement, family, violent yet delicate masculinity, undervalued yet imperative work—Alluri's lines quiver with the poet's distinctive rendering of praise and lament steeped with "gravity and blood" where "the smell of ants being born surrounds us" and "city lights form constellations // invented to symbolize war." The Flayed City offers a powerful glimpse into a secondary world whose cities, cultural histories and trajectories are hybrids or "immigrated" versions of this one.

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It's 1980s New York, and though the coke flows freely, money and glamour are the more powerful intoxicants. While fortunes are being made in SoHo galleries and on Wall Street, an underclass of transient drag queens and dandies, club kids and strippers, artists and actors, models and waitstaff wander the streets, providing the city's background color, cheap labor and even cheaper entertainment. The unnamed narrator of Catherine Liu's 1997 novel Oriental Girls Desire Romance--now reprinted by Kaya Press--is a young Chinese-American woman who skirts the edges of New York privilege. A refugee both from her Ivy League education and a family of Maoist ideologues, she navigates the city as a slacker, temp and exotic dancer, outmaneuvering the ever-present lure of Prozac. Liu's debut novel recalls the seedy street atmosphere of Bette Gordon's 1984 film Variety through a narrator that is perceptive, funny and unhinged.

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Twenty-one years after Kaya Press first published Sesshu Foster’s City Terrace Field Manual, a powerful collection of prose poems that map the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Foster's childhood, comes a new collection of poetry and prose that takes on gentrification, modernization and globalization, as told from the same corner of this rapidly changing metropolis. Winner the CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry, 2019 These poems are, in the poet’s words: “Postcards written with ocotillo and yucca. Gentrification of your face inside your sleep. Privatization of identity, corners, and intimations. Wars on the nerve, colors, breathing. Postcard poems of early and late notes, mucilage, American loneliness. Postcard poems of slopes, films of dust and crows. Incarceration nation ‘Wish You Were Here’ postcards 35 cents emerge from gentrified pants. You can’t live like this. Postcards sent into the future. You can’t live here now; you must live in the future, in the City of the Future.” Poet, teacher and community activist Sesshu Foster (born 1957) was born and raised in East Los Angeles. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and returned to LA to continue teaching, writing and community organizing. His third collection of poetry, World Ball Notebook (2009), won an American Book Award and an Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. Foster is the author of the speculative-fiction novel Atomik Aztex (2005), which won the Believer Book Award and imagines an America free of European colonizers.

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Roughhouse gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence and deviant sex that connect a surreal, semi-rural childhood with adult urban neurosis. Terse flashes of narrative, told from the point of view of a troubled youth, provide a stark sketch of an American family on the brink: a gun-toting father prone to inexplicable rages; a mother who speaks in ineffectual, half-remembered Chinese homilies; siblings rendered almost mute from excessive bleakness. And there’s the narrator himself, who responds to the torment of home and neighborhood bullies with increasingly aberrant behavior, including sexual bondage and a form of pyromania that requires placing a paper bag over one’s head and igniting it. In spare, unrelenting prose that has been honed to a point, Rutkowski ferrets out the hard bone of absurdity at the center of emotional displacement. Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in New York. His work has been published in numerous publications, including Fiction magazine and The New York Times. He is a winner of the Nuyorican Poets Café’s Poetry Slam. “[Rutkowski’s] sulfuric tale of family breakdown and fetishism chronicles the confusion and opacity of traumatic childhood even as it criticizes the American society that tolerates such inhumanity.”— Publishers Weekly “Rutkowski gives us a novel in bites and slices: sharp, shocking, and certainly not for the faint-hearted. Here is gall with gusto, a voice of reckoning, and writing to be reckoned with.” — Molly Peacock

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Adopted from Korea at the age of two, Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut grew up in New England, a circumstance that inevitably prompted an early fascination with the diaspora that followed the Korean civil war. She observes that, accordingly, “many of my poems repeat and return to the themes of inarticulable loss, separation, and reimagination of the family and kinship.” As the title of this debut collection suggests, Schildkraut locates these themes in a formal expression oriented between refrain as song and refrain as restraint--“a nuanced method of expressing the equivocal and uncertain” that produces a tense flexibility in the look and feel of her poems. Schildkraut’s provocative and intensely lyrical poems seek to both unsettle and complicate presumptions about what binds people together in times of longing and loss. They do not draw solely on personal experience, but also tell the larger tale of the Korean diaspora--particularly the experiences of its women--in stories of war brides, defectors, birth mothers and other adoptees.

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Brian Castro’s award-winning novel, The Garden Book, is a meditation on loneliness, addiction and exploitation. Set in the years between the Depression and the Second World War in Australia’s Dandenong Ranges, it follows the emotionally turbulent life of the beautiful Swan Hay (born Shuang He)--her marriage to the passionate yet brutal Darcy Damon, her love affair with the aviator Jasper Zenlin and her rise to literary fame overseas after her poetry is translated into French without her knowledge. Fifty years after her disappearance into institutions and a life of poverty and despair, Norman Shih--a rare-book librarian and "expert in self-effacement"--begins to piece together the life and losses of Swan. Tracking down clues from guesthouse libraries, antiquarian bookshops and Swan’s own haunted writings, Shih fills out a portrait of early twentieth-century Australian lives wracked by modernist impulses of racial prejudice.

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A bestseller in New Zealand and winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Prize, Sia Figiel's debut marks the first time a novel by a Samoan woman has been published in the United States. Figiel uses the traditional Samoan storytelling form of su'ifefiloi to talk back to Western anthropological studies of Samoan women and culture. Told in a series of linked episodes, this powerful and highly original narrative follows 13-year-old Alofa Filiga as she navigates the mores and restrictions of her village and comes to terms with her own search for identity. ”A story of Samoan puberty blues, in which Gauguin is dead but Elvis lives on.” –Vogue Australia ”A storytelling triumph.” –Elle Australia

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Described by Bob Holman as "Li Po in drag, the voice of New America," Koon Woon exploded onto the poetry scene in the late 1990s. Largely self-taught, and struggling with both mental illness and homelessness, Seattle-based Woon wrote about the back alleys and tenement rooms on the margins of immigrant culture. His first collection, The Truth in Rented Rooms (included in this volume), won a PEN poetry prize and earned praise from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Garrison Keillor. Water Chasing Water is Woon's second collection, and continues his exploration of loneliness and memory with poems and essays that seek out "This light / Without which existence is not detectable."

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Spanning more than a half-century of South Korean sci-fi, this massive anthology documents a unique convergence of culture and genre Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction presents the first book-length English-language translation of science and speculative fiction from South Korea, bringing together 13 classic and contemporary stories from the 1960s through the 2010s. From the reimagining of an Asimovian robot inside the walls of a Buddhist temple and a postapocalyptic showdown between South and North Korean refugees on a faraway planet to a fictional recollection of a disabled woman's struggle to join an international space mission, these stories showcase the thematic and stylistic versatility of South Korean science-fiction writers in its wide array. At once conversant with the global science-fiction tradition and thick with local historical specificities, their works resonate with other popular cultural products of South Korea—from K-pop and K-drama to videogames, which owe part of their appeal to their pulsating technocultural edge and their ability to play off familiar tropes in unexpected ways. Coming from a country renowned for its hi-tech industry and ultraspeed broadband yet mired in the unfinished Cold War, South Korean science fiction offers us fresh perspectives on global technoindustrial modernity and its human consequences. The book also features a critical introduction, an essay on SF fandom in South Korea, and contextualizing information and annotations for each story. Authors include Geo-il Bok, In-Hun Choi, Djuna, Soyeon Jeong, Bo-Young Kim, Changgyu Kim, Jung-hyuk Kim, Young-ha Kim, Taewoon Lim, Yunseong Mun, Seonghwan Park, Min-gyu Pak, I-Hyeong Yun, Seonghwan Park, Mingyu Pak and I-Hyeong Yun.

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Illuminated by pop fantasies, Donna Summer disco tracks and teen passion, the fiercely earnest characters in Rolling the R’s come to life against a background of burning dreams and neglect in a small 1970s Hawaiian community. In his daring first novel, R. Zamora Linmark treats the music of the Bee Gees and schoolyard bullying as equally formative experiences in the lives of a group of Filipino fourth-graders living in Kalihi, Honolulu, who call themselves the "Farrah Fawcett Fan Club." The characters’ stories unfold largely in the documentary detritus of their lives—their poems and prayers, book reports and teacher evaluations—all written in carefully observed, pitch-perfect vernacular. Now back in stock, Linmark’s tour-de-force experiments in narrative structure, pidgin and perspective roll every "are," throwing new light on gay identity and the trauma of cultural assimilation. Rolling the R’s goes beyond "coming of age" and "coming out" to address the realities of cultural confusion, prejudice and spiraling levels of desire in humorous yet haunting portrayals that are, as Matthew Stadler writes, "stylish, shameless and beautiful." This special twentieth anniversary edition includes a new essay by the author, introducing one of the most original and iconic stories of the Asian diasporic experience and an essential work of fiction in the Asian American literary canon. R. Zamora Linmark (born 1968) is a writer and poet currently based in Honolulu and Manila. He has published three poetry collections, two novels and adapted Rolling the R’s for the stage in 2008.

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After 40 years in Australia, António Castro packs a bag and walks out of his old life forever. The victim of a restlessness he calls "Shanghai Dancing," António seeks to understand the source of his condition in his family's wanderings. Reversing his parents' own migration, António heads back to their native Shanghai, where his world begins to fragment as his ancestry starts to flood into his present, and emissaries of glittering pre-war China, evangelical Liverpool and seventeenth-century Portugal merge into contemporary backdrops across Asia, Europe and Australia. A "fictional autobiography," Shanghai Dancing is a dazzling meditation on identity, language and disorientation that combines photographs and written images in the style of W.G. Sebald. The Age has described the book as "an extraordinary polyglot mix of sources: Portuguese, Chinese, English, Jewish and Catholic, and a mysterious recessive black gene... told in Castro's characteristically baroque prose, dense with its passion for language and serious wordplay." The winner of some of Australia's top literary prizes, Shanghai Dancing has been praised by its judges as "a work of major significance [that] challenges our expectations of storytelling... It is impressive as history, as fiction, as a book which stretches the literary form and which speaks to the universality of the human experience." Shanghai Dancing marks the U.S. debut of a major Australian literary figure.

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Hiroshi Kono is eight years old and only just beginning to question the racial and economic inequities he sees around him, when he and his family--along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans--are packed off to a concentration camp run by the US government. The harsh and barren world of the Arizona desert where Hiroshi and his family find themselves sets sibling against sibling, parent against child and neighbor against neighbor in a complex grappling with duty and disappointment that will reverberate through the ensuing decades. Sexual initiation, kabuki tales, jazz clubs and alcoholism form the backdrop against which Hiroshi, his siblings and his parents struggle to define themselves. Whether describing Hiroshi’s tumultuous postwar coming of age or excavating generational grievances exacerbated by internment, Gene Oishi gives heartbreaking and at times humorous context to the life of a family set adrift by its wartime experiences.

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Maps of City and Body: Shedding Light on the Performances of Denise Uyehara presents the complete texts of "Big Head" and "Maps of City and Body," two of Uyehara's most acclaimed shows. In "Big Head," Uyehara questions the logic of political and personal rhetoric by exploring the relationship between Japanese American internment camps and post-September 11th racial violence. Maps of City and Body takes on subjects ranging from the trails left behind by childhood kisses to the reimagining of a grandmother's fiery suicide, to explore how memories mark our bodies. In both works, Uyehara remains unflinchingly attentive to the transformative details that give our lives shape. This selection of Uyehara's performance pieces has been designed to function as both experience and documentation. It includes images from her performances, as well as detailed stage directions. It also includes detailed descriptions of Uyehara's other public art investigations, as well as a conversation with dancer/scholar Yutian Wong, a chronology of readings and stagings, and a bibliography. Maps of City and Body is the first in a series of books from Kaya Press on Asian diasporic performance artists.

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The history and experiences of mixed-race Japan have long remained almost invisible in a country that believes in its own myths of homogeneity, despite a history that extends backwards to the 8th-century emperor Kammu Tenno (who was part Korean) through to Japan’s first female physician (part German) during the 19th century, and forward to the present day, when 1 of every 30 Japanese babies are born to families with one non-Japanese parent. Hapa Japan: History (Volume 1) is the first substantial collection of essays to survey the history of global mixed-race identities of persons of Japanese descent. Edited by Duncan Ryuken Williams, the founder of the Hapa Japan Database Project, this groundbreaking work unsettles binary and simplistic notions of race by making visible the complex lives of individuals often written out of history. Duncan Ryuken Williams is Associate Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California.

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Mouth, Lisa Chen's debut collection of poetry, gives voice to things that occur below the level of hearing or just beyond our notice--fragments of translated stories, unanswered bits of conversations, the mute assertiveness of a room. In language filled with humor, insight, and hallucinatory wit, Chen uses fables, instructions, poems carved in the loneliness of Angel Island barracks, medical reports, classified ads and reality shows to reach out to "a visitor from the country of you/where I didn't speak the language." These are poems to delight in and roll around on your tongue. They are at once a record of and a song for the discarded, overlooked, and unheeded speech that takes place in between the words we manage to speak but that rarely say what we want.

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America and Other Poems is the first English translation of a single volume by the seminal Japanese Modernist poet, Ayukawa Nobuo. One of Japan's most influential yet overlooked poets, Nobuo was an important voice for peace and probity in the years that followed World War II and the collapse of Japan's rationale for war. This landmark selection spans from 1947 through 1976, and includes work ranging from early writings about the poet's experience on the front line to poems focused on the influence of Western culture on Japanese society. Nobuo's lyrical, complex poetry offers a rare perspective on war from an ordinary Japanese soldier's point of view. It also provides a window into the complex postwar relationship between Western literary culture and the Japanese struggle to make sense of postwar accountability. This award-winning translation also features texts by Shogo Oketani, contextualizing Nobuo's life and work.

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Blending myth with interviews and first-person narrative, California-based writer Amarnath Ravva’s American Canyon uses prose, documentary footage and still photos to recount the fragmented and ever-evolving story of one person’s apprehension of the ghosts of history. Written from a series of video notes taken over a period of ten years, this narrative of a son’s love for his mother and the ritual he performs for her takes us from California to Rameswaram, the southern tip of the Indian peninsula. It is a meditation on the moments in history that placed him in front of a small bright fire, a lament for the continual loss of those who, by remembering, let us know who we are. Ravva’s American Canyon has been described by poet and author Kevin Killian as “a complex reworking of memoir form, using the tools of poetry remelted, as in Vulcan’s forge, to slash away at the ghosts and ghouls of conventional prose usage. The new journalism, Ravva-style, stimulates the nerve endings with its alternately lush and spare renditions of some spectacular settings...” Ravva has given readings and performed at LACMA, Machine Project, the MAK Center at the Schindler House, New Langton Arts, the Hammer Museum, USC, Pomona, CalArts and the Sorbonne.

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A memoir about the lingering racial trauma of America's concentration camps, from the author of Fox Drum BebopCan one wreak vengeance against oneself? This anguished question hangs over Gene Oishi's powerful memoir about his lifelong struggle to claim both his Japanese and American identities in the aftermath of World War II, when he and more than 120,000 other Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in America's concentration camps. From the moment he and everyone like him on the West Coast is deemed a threat to national security by President Roosevelt's infamous Executive Order 9066, Oishi finds himself trying to distance himself from his Japanese heritage even as he questions whether he will ever truly be accepted as fully American. Throughout his return to California as a teenager, his postwar service in the US Army and his subsequent career in journalism and politics, the deep wounds caused by the trauma of incar

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New adventures in posthuman sci-fi from the author of I'm Waiting for You Longlisted for National Book Award in Translated Literature, 2021 Straddling science fiction, fantasy and myth, the writings of award-winning author Bo-Young Kim have garnered a cult following in South Korea, where she is widely acknowledged as a pioneer and inspiration. On the Origin of Species makes available for the first time in English some of Kim’s most acclaimed stories, as well as an essay on science fiction. Her strikingly original, thought-provoking work teems with human and non-human beings, all of whom are striving to survive through evolution, whether biologically, technologically or socially. Kim’s literature of ideas offers some of the most rigorous and surprisingly poignant reflections on posthuman existence being written today. Bo-Young Kim (born 1975) won the inaugural Korean Science & Technology Creative Writing Award with her first published novella in 2004 and has gone on to win the annual South Korean SF Novel Award three times. In addition to writing, she regularly serves as a lecturer, juror and editor of sci-fi anthologies, and served as a consultant to Parasite director Bong Joon Ho's earlier sci-fi film Snowpiercer. She has novellas forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2021. She lives in Gangwon Province, South Korea, with her family.

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The film Kiku and Isamu (1959) was one of the first cinematic depictions of mixed-race children in postwar Japan, telling the story of two protagonists facing abandonment by two different Black GI fathers and ostracism from Japanese society. Bringing together studies of the representations of the Hapa Japanese experience in culture, Hapa Japan: Identities & Representations (Volume 2) tackles everything from Japanese and American films like Kiku and Isamu to hybrid graphic novels featuring mixed-race characters. From Muslim Japanese-Pakistani children in a Tokyo public school to “Blasian” youth at the AmerAsian School close to a US military base in Okinawa, the Hapa experience is multiple, and its cultural representations accordingly are equally diverse. This anthology is the first publication to attempt to map this wide range of Hapa representations in film, art and society.

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The U.S. debut of internationally acclaimed poet and performance artist Shailja Patel, Migritude is a tour-de-force hybrid text that confounds categories and conventions. Part poetic memoir, part political history, Migritude weaves together family history, reportage and monologues to create an achingly beautiful portrait of women's lives and migrant journeys undertaken under the boot print of Empire. Patel, who was born in Kenya and educated in England and the U.S., honed her poetic skills in performances of this work that have received standing ovations throughout Europe, Africa and North America. She has been described by the Gulf Times as "the poetic equivalent of Arundhati Roy" and by CNN as "the face of globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange." Migritude includes interviews with the author, as well as performance notes and essays.

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Introducing English readers to the speculative fiction of pseudonymous author Djuna, whose writings and interventions into internet culture have attracted a cult following in South Korea The stories brought together in this collection introduce for the first time in English the dazzling speculative imaginings of Djuna, one of South Korea's most provocative SF writers. Whether describing a future society light years away or satirizing Confucian patriarchy, these stories evoke a universe at once familiar and clearly fantastical. Also collected here for the first time are all six stories set in the Linker Universe, where a mutating virus sends human beings reeling through the galaxy into a dizzying array of fracturing realities. Blending influences ranging from genre fiction (zombie, vampire, SF, you name it) to golden-age cinema to Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Djuna's stories together form a brilliantly intertextual, mordantly funny critique of the human condition as it evolves into less and more than what it once was. Film critic and speculative fiction writer Djuna, who first appeared as an online presence in the early 1990s, has steadfastly refused to confirm any personal details regarding age, gender or legal name, or even whether they are one person or multiple. Djuna is widely considered one of the most prolific and important writers in South Korean science fiction. They have published nine short story collections, three novels, and numerous essays and uncollected stories.

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