Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month: Reading Favorites

There are some books you want to read, and there are some books you need to read. This is one of those! Author Zeyn Joukhadar is a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). The Map of Salt and Stars is his remarkable debut with a sweeping, thrillingly ambitious tale of Nour, Rawiya, and their parallel searches for home. In twin narratives that unfold eight hundred years apart, Joukhadar captures the unrelenting courage of those who persist amid the trials of exile. It is a deep immersion into the richly varied cultures of the Middle East and North Africa and is to Syria what The Kite Runner was to Afghanistan. It is currently being translated into twenty languages, was a 2018 Middle East Book Award winner in Youth Literature, a 2018 Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist in Historical Fiction. 

The sequel to The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and went on to sell over a million copies worldwide, The Committed published recently in March this year, tells the story of “the man of two minds” as he comes as a refugee to France and turns his hand to capitalism. It  follows the Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris as a refugee. There he and his blood brother Bon try to escape their pasts and prepare for their futures by turning their hands to capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. The new life he makes has dangers he has not foreseen, from the oppression of the state, to the self-torture of addiction, to the seemingly unresolvable paradox of how he can reunite his two closest friends, men whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition. Both literary thriller and brilliant novel of ideas, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement author Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters.

Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden’s raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight. With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawaii to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. With several awards and relentless praise under its belt, it is searing, vivid, and deeply thoughtful. You simply have to read it!  

Here is an irreverent, poignant, and often hysterically funny debut novel by an amazing new voice! Following two families from Pakistan in the 1990s, and Iraq to San Francisco in 2016, The Bad Muslim Discount is a hilarious, timely, and provocative comic novel about being Muslim immigrants in modern America.  Anvar Faris, a restless, rebellious, and sharp-tongued boy along with his brother and parents move to California to escape the control of fundamentalists in their country and their desi experience is extremely relevant to all South Asians be it in Asia or America. With deep insight, warmth, and an irreverent sense of humor, author Syed M. Masood examines universal questions of identity, faith (or lack thereof), and belonging through the lens of Muslim Americans. For fans of Hanif Kureshi, Mira Jacob, and Mohammed Hanif this is a perfect read!

This is author R. O. Kwon’s debut novel, named Best Book Of The Year in 2019 by over forty publications. It is a powerful, darkly glittering novel of violence, love, faith, and loss, as a young woman at an elite American university is drawn into acts of domestic terrorism by a cult tied to North Korea. Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet in their first month at prestigious Edwards University. Phoebe is increasingly drawn into a religious group—a secretive extremist cult—founded by a charismatic former student, John Leal. He has an enigmatic past that involves North Korea and Phoebe’s Korean American family. Meanwhile, Will struggles to confront the fundamentalism he’s tried to escape, and the obsession consuming the one he loves. The Incendiaries is a fractured love story and a brilliant examination of the minds of extremist terrorists, and of what can happen to people who lose what they love most.