Korean American Day is January 13th
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Trust exercise : a novel
Summary:In 1982 in a southern city, David and Sarah, two freshmen at a highly competitive performing arts high school, thrive alongside their school peers in a rarified bubble, ambitiously devoting themselves to their studies ;to music, to movement, to Shakespeare and, particularly, to classes taught by the magnetic acting teacher Mr. Kingsley. It is here in these halls that David and Sarah fall innocently and powerfully into first love. And also where, as this class of students rises through the ranks of high school, the outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and the future, does not affect them–until it does. -
Kim Jiyoung, born 1982
Summary:"In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul, Kim Jiyoung-a millennial "everywoman"-spends her days caring for her infant daughter. Her husband, however, worries over a strange symptom that has recently appeared: Jiyoung has begun to impersonate the voices of other women-dead and alive, both known and unknown to her. Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that very person. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, Jiyoung’s concerned husband sends her to a psychiatrist, who listens to her narrate her own life story-from her birth to a family who expected a son, to elementary school teachers who policed girls’ outfits, to male coworkers who installed hidden cameras in women’s restrooms and posted the photos online. But can her doctor cure her, or even discover what truly ails her?" -
Your house will pay : a novel
Summary:A powerful and taut novel about racial tensions following two Los Angeles families–one Korean-American, one African American–grappling with the effects of a decades-old crime.old crime. -
The kinship of secrets
Summary:"From the author of The Calligrapher’s Daughter comes the riveting story of two sisters, one raised in the United States, the other in South Korea, and the family that bound them together even as the Korean War kept them apart." -
Shelter
Summary:"Kyung Cho is a young father burdened by a house he can’t afford. Nearby in an exclusive neighborhood, an act of violence leaves his well-to-do parents unable to stay on their own. Living under the same roof, old feelings of guilt and anger surface. This masterful debut asks what it means to provide for one’s family and answers with a story as riveting as it is profound. -
Free food for millionaires
Summary:"Goodbye, Columbus meets the novels of Amy Tan in this American story of class, society and identity that marks the debut of a new voice in fiction"–Provided by the publisher. -
The incendiaries : a novel
Summary:A young Korean-American woman at an elite American university is drawn into acts of domestic terrorism by a cult tied to North Korea and then disappears, leading a fellow student into an obsessive search for her. -
On such a full sea
Summary:From the author of Native Speaker and The Surrendered, this is a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman’s legendary quest to comprehend the life into which she has been born, in a shocking future America. Here the author takes his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. He brings us into a world created from scratch, a vividly imagined future America. In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class-descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China, find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement. In return for their contributions, the workers are protected from the violence of the wild, crime -ridden, anarchic quasi-states that exist elsewhere. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan’s journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that begins to call into question everything she knows about herself and her destiny, that will soon become legend to those she left behind. The novel explores the delicate balance between fate and free will, ignorance and knowledge, subjection and control, and how quickly the tide can change. It is a novel with contemporary relevance and insight into American anxieties about Chinese power and influence, and our own prospects and legacies. — Provided by publisher. -
The queen of the night
Summary:Lilliet Berne is a sensation of the Paris Opera, a legendary soprano with every accolade except an original role, every singers’ chance at immortality. When one is finally offered to her, she realizes with alarm that the libretto is based on a hidden piece of her past. Only four could have betrayed her: one is dead, one loves her, one wants to own her. And one, she hopes, never thinks of her at all. As she mines her memories for clues, she recalls her life as an orphan who left the American frontier for Europe and was swept up into the glitzy, gritty world of Second Empire Paris. In order to survive, she transformed herself from hippodrome rider to courtesan, from empress’s maid to debut singer, all the while weaving a complicated web of romance, obligation, and political intrigue. -
Pachinko
Summary:"In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant-and that her lover is married-she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations."–Page [4] of cover.