Download or read book The Family Chao written by Lan Samantha Chang and published by . This book was released on 2022-02-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book All Is Forgotten Nothing Is Lost A Novel written by Lan Samantha Chang and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2011-09-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A haunting story of art, ambition, love, and friendship by a writer of elegant, exacting prose.

Download or read book American Panda written by Gloria Chao and published by Simon Pulse. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Weepingly funny.” —The Wall Street Journal “Delightful.” —BuzzFeed “Charmed my socks off.” —David Arnold, New York Times bestselling author of Kids of Appetite and Mosquitoland Four starred reviews for this incisive, laugh-out-loud contemporary debut about a Taiwanese-American teen whose parents want her to be a doctor and marry a Taiwanese Ivy Leaguer despite her squeamishness with germs and crush on a Japanese classmate. At seventeen, Mei should be in high school, but skipping fourth grade was part of her parents’ master plan. Now a freshman at MIT, she is on track to fulfill the rest of this predetermined future: become a doctor, marry a preapproved Taiwanese Ivy Leaguer, produce a litter of babies. With everything her parents have sacrificed to make her cushy life a reality, Mei can’t bring herself to tell them the truth—that she (1) hates germs, (2) falls asleep in biology lectures, and (3) has a crush on her classmate Darren Takahashi, who is decidedly not Taiwanese. But when Mei reconnects with her brother, Xing, who is estranged from the family for dating the wrong woman, Mei starts to wonder if all the secrets are truly worth it. Can she find a way to be herself, whoever that is, before her web of lies unravels? From debut author Gloria Chao comes a hilarious, heartfelt tale of how, unlike the panda, life isn’t always so black and white.

Download or read book Remembering Shanghai written by Isabel Sun Chao and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A volume that demands to be held." --Los Angeles Review of Books True stories of glamour, drama, and tragedy told through five generations of a Shanghai family, from the last days of imperial rule to the Cultural Revolution. A high position bestowed by China's empress dowager grants power and wealth to the Sun family. For Isabel, growing up in glamorous 1930s and '40s Shanghai, it is a life of utmost privilege. But while her scholar father and fashionable mother shelter her from civil war and Japanese occupation, they cannot shield the family forever. When Mao comes to power, eighteen-year-old Isabel journeys to Hong Kong, not realizing that she will make it her home--and that she will never see her father again. She returns to Shanghai fifty years later with her daughter, Claire, to confront their family's past--one they discover is filled with love and betrayal, kidnappers and concubines, glittering palaces and underworld crime bosses. Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Remembering Shanghai follows five generations from a hardscrabble village to the bright lights of Hong Kong. By turns harrowing and heartwarming, this vivid memoir explores identity, loss, and redemption against an epic backdrop. WINNER OF 20 LITERARY AND DESIGN AWARDS, INCLUDING: Writer's Digest GRAND PRIZE Rubery Book Award BOOK OF THE YEAR IAN Independent Author Network OUTSTANDING MEMOIR IPPY Independent Publisher Book Awards BEST FIRST BOOK Reader Views GLOBAL AWARD

Download or read book Rent a Boyfriend written by Gloria Chao and published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2020-11-10 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before meets The Farewell in this incisive romantic comedy about a college student who hires a fake boyfriend to appease her traditional Taiwanese parents, to disastrous results, from the acclaimed author of American Panda. Chloe Wang is nervous to introduce her parents to her boyfriend, because the truth is, she hasn’t met him yet either. She hired him from Rent for Your ’Rents, a company specializing in providing fake boyfriends trained to impress even the most traditional Asian parents. Drew Chan’s passion is art, but after his parents cut him off for dropping out of college to pursue his dreams, he became a Rent for Your ’Rents employee to keep a roof over his head. Luckily, learning protocols like “Type C parents prefer quiet, kind, zero-PDA gestures” comes naturally to him. When Chloe rents Drew, the mission is simple: convince her parents fake Drew is worthy of their approval so they’ll stop pressuring her to accept a proposal from Hongbo, the wealthiest (and slimiest) young bachelor in their tight-knit Asian American community. But when Chloe starts to fall for the real Drew—who, unlike his fake persona, is definitely not ’rent-worthy—her carefully curated life begins to unravel. Can she figure out what she wants before she loses everything?

Download or read book Inheritance A Novel written by Lan Samantha Chang and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-08-17 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning seven decades and set in China and America against a backdrop of political chaos and social upheaval, this arresting debut novel tells a timeless story of familial devotion undermined by deceit and passion and rebuilt by memory. In 1931, abandoned after their mother's suicide, the young Junan and her sister, Yinan, make a pact never to leave each other. The two girls are inseparable—until Junan enters into an arranged marriage and finds herself falling in love with her soldier husband. When the Japanese invade China, Junan and her husband are separated. Unable to follow him to the wartime capital, Junan makes the fateful decision to send her sister after him. Inheritance traces the echo of betrayal through generations and explores the elusive nature of trust.

Download or read book Our Wayward Fate written by Gloria Chao and published by Simon Pulse. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A story that’s sure to stick with you for a long time.” —BuzzFeed “More than a coming-of-age novel.” —School Library Journal “[An] inventive, deeply heartfelt love story that explores connections of many kinds.” —Booklist A teen outcast is simultaneously swept up in a whirlwind romance and down a rabbit hole of dark family secrets when another Taiwanese family moves to her small, predominantly white midwestern town in this remarkable novel from the critically acclaimed author of American Panda. Seventeen-year-old Ali Chu knows that as the only Asian person at her school in middle-of-nowhere Indiana, she must be bland as white toast to survive. This means swapping her congee lunch for PB&Js, ignoring the clueless racism from her classmates and teachers, and keeping her mouth shut when people wrongly call her Allie instead of her actual name, pronounced Āh-lěe, after the mountain in Taiwan. Her autopilot existence is disrupted when she finds out that Chase Yu, the new kid in school, is also Taiwanese. Despite some initial resistance due to the “they belong together” whispers, Ali and Chase soon spark a chemistry rooted in competitive martial arts, joking in two languages, and, most importantly, pushing back against the discrimination they face. But when Ali’s mom finds out about the relationship, she forces Ali to end it. As Ali covertly digs into the why behind her mother’s disapproval, she uncovers secrets about her family and Chase that force her to question everything she thought she knew about life, love, and her unknowable future. Snippets of a love story from 19th-century China (a retelling of the Chinese folktale The Butterfly Lovers) are interspersed with Ali’s narrative and intertwined with her fate.

Download or read book Hunger A Novella and Stories written by Lan Samantha Chang and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-09-08 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A masterwork of enormous power.” —Min Jin Lee, author of Pachinko The searing debut of “one of the most influential writers in American letters…Hunger is a masterpiece, a necessary haunting” (Justin Torres, author of We the Animals). A powerful exploration of the Asian American experience, Hunger weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family into poignant tales of love and loss. Celebrated author Lan Samantha Chang illuminates the lives of first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and emotionally uprooted from their homeland, who mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment—and shows how their choices shape their children. The characters who inhabit this extraordinary collection, “a work of gorgeous, enduring prose” (Helen C. Wan, Washington Post), are caught between the burden of their past and the fragility of their unchartered future.

Download or read book The Great Mistake written by Jonathan Lee and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exultant novel of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, about one man's rise to fame and fortune, and his mysterious murder—“engrossing” (Wall Street Journal), “immersive” (The New Yorker), and “seriously entertaining” (The Sunday Times, London). Andrew Haswell Green is dead, shot at the venerable age of eighty-three, when he thought life could hold no more surprises. The killing—on Park Avenue in broad daylight, on Friday the thirteenth—shook the city. Born to a struggling farmer, Green was a self-made man without whom there would be no Central Park, no Metropolitan Museum of Art, no Museum of Natural History, no New York Public Library. But Green had a secret, a life locked within him that now, in the hour of his death, may finally break free. A work of tremendous depth and piercing emotion, The Great Mistake is the story of a city transformed, a murder that made a private man infamous, and a portrait of a singular individual who found the world closed off to him—yet enlarged it.

Download or read book Vladimir written by Julia May Jonas and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An NPR, Washington Post, Time, People, Vulture, Guardian, Vox, Kirkus Reviews, Newsweek, LitHub, and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year * “Delightful…cathartic, devious, and terrifically entertaining.” —The New York Times * “Timely, whip-smart, and darkly funny.” —People (Book of the Week) A provocative, razor-sharp, and timely debut novel about a beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her professor husband by former students—a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own... “When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me.” And so we are introduced to our deliciously incisive narrator: a popular English professor whose charismatic husband at the same small liberal arts college is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had a mutual understanding when it comes to their extra-marital pursuits, but with these new allegations, life has become far less comfortable for them both. And when our narrator becomes increasingly infatuated with Vladimir, a celebrated, married young novelist who’s just arrived on campus, their tinder box world comes dangerously close to exploding. With this bold, edgy, and uncommonly assured debut, author Julia May Jonas takes us into charged territory, where the boundaries of morality bump up against the impulses of the human heart. Propulsive, darkly funny, and wildly entertaining, Vladimir perfectly captures the personal and political minefield of our current moment, exposing the nuances and the grey area between power and desire.

Download or read book Out of the Shadow World written by Colleen Chao and published by Moody Publishers. This book was released on 2023-05-02 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten-year-old Pax Jackson doesn’t know if he’ll make it to his next birthday. He has cancer. And he’s about to embark upon an unforgettable adventure. At their favorite climbing tree, Pax and his best friend, Jayni, meet Wilmer—a comical bellbird who introduces them to a magical realm of delightful and bewitching creatures. The children sail a vast sea, navigate a frightening forest, and summit a perilous mountain in search of a mysterious man who might be able to heal Pax. Will they be thwarted by a malevolent weeping willow, a horde of Bumfuzzles, or the dragon snake? The kids face their fears and the lurking evil that threatens to destroy them. And they also contend with their own inner struggles: Pax, wounded by Jayni’s ignorance of suffering, and Jayni, resentful of how Pax’s illness has changed him. Will the mysterious healer meet their dreams and expectations? Pax and Jayni return to their world with newfound joy and hope—and a keen awareness of the very real magical world that lies within their shadow world. In Out of the Shadow World, Colleen Chao masterfully weaves a tale of suffering and joy. Children will be captivated. Readers develop empathy and a theology of suffering that equips them to both face difficult circumstances and love others who are experiencing hardship.

Download or read book All My Mother s Lovers written by Ilana Masad and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-05-26 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of . . . Electric Literature’s "Most Anticipated Debuts of Early 2020" • O, The Oprah Magazine’s "31 LGBTQ Books That'll Change the Literary Landscape in 2020" • Publishers Weekly’s "Spring 2020 Literary Fiction Announcements" • BuzzFeed's "Most Highly Anticipated Books of 2020" • The Millions's "Most Anticipated: The Great First-Half 2020 Book Preview" • The Rumpus's "What to Read When 2020 Is Just Around the Corner" • LGBTQ Reads's "2020 LGBTQAP Adult Fiction Preview: January-June" • Lit Hub’s "Most Anticipated Books of 2020" • BookRiot’s "Must-Read Debut Novels of 2020" • Bitch’s "27 Novels Feminists Should Read in 2020" • Harper’s Bazaar's "14 LGBTQ+ Books to Look For in 2020" • NewNowNext’s "11 Queer Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Spring" • Cosmopolitan's "12 Books You'll Be Dying to Read This Summer" • Salon’s "The Best and Boldest New Must-Read Books for May" • Lambda Literary’s “Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of May 2020” • The Rumpus's "What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Mothers" "A queer tour-de-force . . . Compelling and astonishing."–Kristen Arnett, author of Mostly Dead Things Intimacy has always eluded twenty-seven-year-old Maggie Krause—despite being brought up by married parents, models of domestic bliss—until, that is, Lucia came into her life. But when Maggie’s mom, Iris, dies in a car crash, Maggie returns home only to discover a withdrawn dad, an angry brother, and, along with Iris's will, five sealed envelopes, each addressed to a mysterious man she’s never heard of. In an effort to run from her own grief and discover the truth about Iris—who made no secret of her discomfort with her daughter's sexuality—Maggie embarks on a road trip, determined to hand-deliver the letters and find out what these men meant to her mother. Maggie quickly discovers Iris’s second, hidden life, which shatters everything Maggie thought she knew about her parents’ perfect relationship. What is she supposed to tell her father and brother? And how can she deal with her own relationship when her whole world is in freefall? Told over the course of a funeral and shiva, and written with enormous wit and warmth, All My Mother's Lovers is the exciting debut novel from fiction writer and book critic Ilana Masad. A unique meditation on the universality and particularity of family ties and grief, and a tender and biting portrait of sex, gender, and identity, All My Mother's Lovers challenges us to question the nature of fulfilling relationships.

Download or read book The Pages written by Hugo Hamilton and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entirely original novel in which a book—Joseph Roth's masterpiece Rebellion—narrates its own astonishing life story, from 1930s Germany to the present day, at the heart of a gripping mystery. “A powerful, powerful piece of work.” —Colum McCann, best-selling author of Apeirogon One old copy of the novel Rebellion sits in Lena Knecht’s tote bag, about to accompany her on a journey from New York to Berlin in search of a clue to the hand-drawn map on its last page. It is the brilliantly captivating voice of this novel—a first edition nearly burned by Nazis in May 1933—that is our narrator. Fast-paced and tightly plotted, The Pages brings together a multitude of dazzling characters, real and invented, in a sweeping story of survival, chance, and the joys and struggles of love. At its center are Roth, an Austrian Jewish author on the run, and his wife, Friederike, who falls victim to mental illness as Europe descends into war. With vivid evocations of Germany under Nazism and today, The Pages dramatically illuminates the connections between past and present as it looks at censorship, oppression, and violence. Here is a propulsive, inspiring tale of literature over a hundred years: a novel for book lovers everywhere that will bring a fresh audience to this acclaimed writer.

Download or read book The World Cannot Give written by Tara Isabella Burton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2023-03-07 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Secret History meets The Price of Salt” (Vogue) in this “equal parts dangerous and delicious” (Entertainment Weekly) novel about queer desire, religious zealotry, and the hunger for transcendence among the members of a cultic chapel choir at a Maine boarding school—and the ambitious, terrifyingly charismatic girl that rules over them. When shy, sensitive Laura Stearns arrives at St. Dunstan’s Academy in Maine, she dreams that life there will echo her favorite novel, All Before Them, the sole surviving piece of writing by Byronic “prep school prophet” (and St. Dunstan’s alum) Sebastian Webster, who died at nineteen, fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She soon finds the intensity she is looking for among the insular, Webster-worshipping members of the school’s chapel choir, which is presided over by the charismatic, neurotic, overachiever Virginia Strauss. Virginia is as fanatical about her newfound Christian faith as she is about the miles she runs every morning before dawn. She expects nothing short of perfection from herself—and from the member of the choir. Virginia inducts the besotted Laura into a world of transcendent music and arcane ritual, illicit cliff-diving and midnight crypt visits: a world that, like Webster’s novels, finally seems to Laura to be full of meaning. But when a new school chaplain challenges Virginia’s hold on the “family” she has created, and Virginia’s efforts to wield her power become increasingly dangerous, Laura must decide how far she will let her devotion to Virginia go. The World Cannot Give is a “hypnotic and intense” (Shondaland) meditation on the power, and danger, of wanting more from the world.

Download or read book From Manchurian Princess to the American Dream written by Anna Chao Pai and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 1221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While most immigrants to the United States seek better lives than what they had, author Anna Chao Pai’s parents came seeking safety from the Japanese; they left a life of luxury and power to become ordinary American citizens. In the end, the transition to ordinary was traumatic for Pai’s mother, who became mentally unbalanced. In From Manchurian Princess to the American Dream, Pai shares her story which is as much about her mother as it is about her. Pai was four years old when her family came to America from China, forced to flee because of war. She tells how they moved almost once a year, experiencing discrimination against Asians during World Word II, and attended twelve different schools before starting college. While her father and her siblings adjusted, despite racism against Asians, Pai’s mother, unable to learn the language, never assimilated into American life. From Manchurian Princess to the American Dream offers a look at modern Chinese history and culture. It provides insight into the impact of immigration on people who are ripped from their homes and find themselves beginning life in a foreign country where they must learn a new language and eventually lose all they left behind. Noting the courage it took for Pai’s parents to survive, this memoir is a testament to them and her family.

Download or read book How to Cook and Eat in Chinese written by Buwei Yang Chao and published by Echo Point Books & Media, LLC. This book was released on 2022-06-13 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Beloved Classic is Back in Print! A Sampling of Glowing Reviews Tell Why How to Cook and Eat in Chinese is a Classic "Each recipe (and there are hundreds) is lucidly written, the measurements and cooking times as accurate as any starched American home economist could wish for. . . . Having once cooked and eaten in Chinese with Mrs. Chao, one can easily understand why the authors of that great American cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, say, as they disparagingly present in their own book a recipe for Chop Suey, 'To get the feeling of true Chinese food, read Mrs. Buwei Yang Chao's delightful How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.'" -Michael Field, New York Review of Books "Something novel in the way of a cookbook. . . . [It] strikes us as being an authentic account of the Chinese culinary system, which is every bit as complicated as the culture that has produced it". -The New York Times "The Real Deal: I had (and well used) this book for years . . . I love Chinese food, and have read and sampled from dozens of Chinese cookbooks over the years, but this is still my favorite. How To Cook and Eat In Chinese is the real deal." -Amazon Review How to Cook and Eat in Chinese is "more than a cookbook: It is the stage on which Mrs. Chao unfolds a personal, family, and cultural drama." -Janet Theophano, author Eat My Words "Funny! Interesting, unusual and funny. [This is] not just your regular cookbook in form or content. The recipes are good, original and the way the book is written is interesting. [It is] just as interesting to read it for pleasure, as to use as a cookbook." -Amazon Review "There is not a dish in its pages which an American . . . cannot produce, without qualms. . . . As for Mrs. Chao, I would like to nominate her for the Nobel Peace Prize. For what better road to universal peace is there than to gather around the table where new and delicious dishes are set forth, dishes which, though yet untasted by us, we are destined to enjoy and love?" -Pearl S. Buck

Download or read book The Seventh Day written by Yu Hua and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2015-01-13 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed author of Brothers and To Live: a major new novel that limns the joys and sorrows of life in contemporary China. Yang Fei was born on a moving train. Lost by his mother, adopted by a young switchman, raised with simplicity and love, he is utterly unprepared for the tempestuous changes that await him and his country. As a young man, he searches for a place to belong in a nation that is ceaselessly reinventing itself, but he remains on the edges of society. At age forty-one, he meets an accidental and unceremonious death. Lacking the money for a burial plot, he must roam the afterworld aimlessly, without rest. Over the course of seven days, he encounters the souls of the people he’s lost. As Yang Fei retraces the path of his life, we meet an extraordinary cast of characters: his adoptive father, his beautiful ex-wife, his neighbors who perished in the demolition of their homes. Traveling on, he sees that the afterworld encompasses all the casualties of today’s China—the organ sellers, the young suicides, the innocent convicts—as well as the hope for a better life to come. Yang Fei’s passage maps the contours of this vast nation—its absurdities, its sorrows, and its soul. Vivid, urgent, and panoramic, The Seventh Day affirms Yu Hua’s place as the standard-bearer of modern Chinese fiction.