A factual firsthand account of how and why former United States President Bill Clinton received and hid highly illegal quid pro quo campaign finance contributions to cover-up U. S. Treasury theft--and the problem that America faces because of it.

The President and the Queen

Kiah, William R.

Kaya Press

Fiction. LGBT Studies. Asian American Studies. In this daring first novel, tour-de-force experiments in narrative structure, pidgin, and perspective roll every "are," throwing new light on gay identity and the trauma of assimilation. "The prose is delirious, dense, and florid. The kids bloom in rapid-fire stories, blossoming like flowers in hothouse air. Their talk is dizzying, full of sex, television, and cheap, glamorous dreams. It's Our Town in the American 1970s"—Matthew Stadler.

Rolling the R's

Literature & Fiction

Linmark, R. Zamora

United States

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.

Migritude

Poetry

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.

Magnetic Refrain

Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut

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.

The Garden Book

Castro, Brian

Literary

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.

Lydia's Funeral Video

Chanse, Samantha

Originally self-published in 1935, H.T. Tsiang’s hallucinatory, quasi-experimental novel Hanging on Union Square explores leftist politics in Depression-era New York--an era of union busting and food lines--in an ambitious style that brilliantly blends Gertrude Stein’s playful language with the political satire of Carl Sandberg’s prose fables. It follows the peripatetic musings of a young man throughout a single day that takes him from a worker’s cafeteria to a world of dinner clubs and sexual exploitation in the highest echelons of society, and back again to the streets of Greenwich Village, where starving families rub shoulders with the recently evicted. Each chapter comprises a single hour of the day. Tsiang’s style combines satirical allegory with snatches of poetry, newspaper quotations, non-sequiturs and slogans, as well as elements of classical and contemporary Chinese literature. Adventurous and unclassifiable in its combination of avant-garde and proletarian concerns, Hanging on Union Square is a major rediscovery of a uniquely American voice.

The Hanging on Union Square

Tsiang, H.T.

Fiction. Asian-American Studies. "EAST GOES WEST is a stunning testament to Younghill Kang's indomitable spirit, his perspicacious eye, and his special mirth. The book provides us with a rare view of how urban American life was experienced-and critiqued-by Korean immigrants in the 1920s"-Elaine Kim. Having fled Japanese-occupied Korea for the gleaming promise of the United States, Han lands in New York with only four dollars and a suitcase full of Shakespeare to his name. Struggling to support his studies, Han becomes by turns traveling salesman, domestic worker, and farmer. In the process, he observes the idealism, greed, and shifting values of the industrializing twentieth century. In its beautifully nuanced portrayal of Han's spiritual evolution and revolutions, its richly detailed examination of a cosmopolitan immigrant subculture, and its biting portraits of racism, alienation, and hypocrisy at every level of society, EAST GOES WEST is a unique American classic.

East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee

Kang, Younghill

Until his death in 2012 at age 100, legendary filmmaker Kaneto Shindo was a living link to more than 70 years of Japanese cinema history. Screenwriter of more than 200 films and director of more than 40, Shindo earned international praise for his masterpieces Children of Hiroshima and The Naked Island, and for the fantastical proto-horror film, Onibaba. In this volume, Shindo narrates his career, from his beginnings as an art director and fledgling screenwriter in the 1930s and 1940s, to his collaborations with such luminaries as Kenji Mizoguchi, Kon Ichikawa and Kinji Fukasaku, to his breakout into independent filmmaking in the 1950s and beyond. This first-ever English language book on Shindo's work is a stunning introduction to one of film's great overlooked masters. It includes the full screenplay of The Naked Island and a foreword by Benicio del Toro.

Life Is Work: Kaneto Shindo and the Art of Directing, Screenwriting, and Living 100 Years Without Regrets

Humor & Entertainment

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.

American Canyon

Ravva, Amarnath

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