This May, discover great literature by Asian American and Pacific Islander authors on the Libby app, accessible via the NMC Library. Libby has both audiobooks and ebooks, with a growing collection of popular fiction and nonfiction. All of the titles featured on this list are available on audiobook. Follow these instructions to download Libby and set up your account.
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 Babel by R. F. Kuang
Dark/Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction in the burgeoning realm of ‘dark academia, Babel is set in an alternate-reality 1830s England during the time of the Opium War and offers critiques of imperialism, capitalism, and the complicity of academia in these systems. Babel won the Nebula Award for best novel in 2022.
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 Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
YA/Romance/Historical
This award-winning young adult novel is an assigned text in NMC’s Young Adult Literature classes. Kirkus called it “the intersectional, lesbian, historical teen novel so many readers have been waiting for.” It takes place in Red-Scare era San Francisco and centers on a teenage daughter of Chinese immigrants, bringing to life seldom-told experiences of queer Asian-Americans in the 1950’s.
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 Happiness Falls by Angie Kim
Domestic fiction/Mystery
“We didn’t call the police right away.” Those are the electric first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing. Full of shocking twists and fascinating questions of love, language, and human connection, Happiness Falls…turns the missing-person story into something wholly original, creating an indelible tale of a family who must go to remarkable lengths to truly understand one another. (this description is from the publisher)
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Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
Short stories
The stories in this collection have been called bizarre, haunting, uncanny, magical realist, dryly funny, and wily. Astra Mag says: “The strangeness of living in a body is exposed, the absurdity of carrying race and gender on one’s face, all against the backdrop of an America in ruin…Ma masterfully captures her characters’ double consciousness, always seeing themselves through the white gaze, in stunning and bold new ways.”
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 Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang
Environmental dystopia
Set in a near-future where food scarcity has been wrought by a mysterious smog, Zhang’s story follows a Chinese-American chef who is lured to an elite colony of the super-rich. Maureen Corrigan (for NPR) calls it an “atmospheric and poetically suspenseful novel about all manner of appetites: for power, food, love, life.”
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 What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo
Memoir
“Every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. . . . I want to have words for what my bones know.” This memoir about healing from complex PTSD is read by the author, whose voice will be familiar to fans of This American Life and Snap Judgement, radio shows where she has been a producer and contributor.
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