Asian Short Stories

Seamlessly transitioning between the absurd and the tenderhearted, balancing acerbic humor with sharp emotional depth, Afterparties offers an expansive portrait of the lives of Cambodian Americans. As the children of refugees carve out radical new paths for themselves in California, they shoulder the inherited weight of the Khmer Rouge genocide and grapple with the complexities of race, sexuality, friendship, and family.

In a quiet suburb of New Delhi, two next-door neighbors develop a friendship: one, a young woman engaged to be married, and the other, Nadine: a woman in her 60s living with her second husband. We follow these two women through their phone calls and visits together, diving deeper into Nadine's storied past: With her larger-than-life personality and proclivity to defy society's conventions, her insight weighs heavily on her young friend, about to face a major turning point of her own.

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, was an Irish writer known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. His book Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, comprises two parts, the first being the "Kwaidan Proper" and the second, "Insect-Studies", which consists of an essay each on ants, butterflies and mosquitos. According to the author, most of the folk tales and ghost stories in the first part were translated from old Japanese texts. The themes encompass resurrection, sacrifice, magic, and the realm of dreams.

Contos de guerreiros japoneses revelará aos seus ouvintes os mais preciosos valores japoneses: disciplina, lealdade, dedicação, perseverança, auto sacrifício, humildade e devoção. Tal arcabouço ético e narrativas envolventes recebem a ilustração de Shusui Okakura e outros artistas, fazendo ecoar da forma mais bela o passado e a memória japonesa.

It's 2020, and children are stuck indoors as the novel coronavirus finds its way into India. A nationwide lockdown is announced, and amidst the growing crisis, Ajja and Ajji welcome their grandchildren and Kamlu Ajji into their house in Shiggaon. From stitching masks, sharing household chores, preparing food for workers to losing themselves in timeless tales, the lockdown turns into a memorable time for the children as they enter the enchanting world of goddesses, kings, princesses, serpents, magical beanstalks, thieves, kingdoms, and palaces, among others.

Xuan Juliana Wang's remarkable debut introduces us to the new and changing face of Chinese youth. From fuerdai (second-generation rich kids) to a glass-swallowing qigong grandmaster, her dazzling, formally inventive stories upend the immigrant narrative to reveal a new experience of belonging: of young people testing the limits of who they are, in a world as vast and varied as their ambitions. In stories of love, family, and friendship, here are the voices, faces, and stories of a new generation never before captured in fiction.

In this captivating collection from the Shaanxi region, considered the cradle of Chinese civilization, twenty disparate and unique voices come together to show a China caught between new-world advancements and old-world traditions. From the homeland of China’s first dynasty and the world-famous terra-cotta warriors, these tales show rugged rural life colliding with fast-paced city life; hollow arranged marriages juxtaposed with torrid forbidden love affairs; and the vanity of newly minted millionaires clashing with the desperation of the poor.

In stories charged by the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, grief, exes, and the profundities of friendship, She Is Haunted features injured ballerinas, cloned dogs, and competitive call centers in settings as far ranging as future and present Australia, New York City’s Chinatown, and suburban California.

The electric, unsettling, and often surreal stories in Let's Go Let's Go Let's Go explore the alienated, technology-mediated lives of restless Asian and Asian American women today. A woman escapes into dating simulations to forget her best friend’s abandonment; a teenager begins to see menacing omens on others’ bodies after her double eyelid surgery; reunited schoolmates are drawn into the Japanese mountains to participate in an uncanny social experiment; a supernatural karaoke machine becomes a K-pop star’s channel for redemption. In every story, characters refuse dutiful, docile stereotypes.

From the remarkable Ha Jin, winner of the National Book Award for his celebrated novel Waiting, comes this collection of comical and deeply moving tales of contemporary China that are as warm and human as they are surprising, disturbing, and delightful. In the title story, the head of security at a factory is shocked, first when the handsomest worker on the floor proposes marriage to his homely adopted daughter, and again when his new son-in-law is arrested for the "crime" of homosexuality.

In the fifteen masterful stories that make up this collection, Jai Chakrabarti crosses continents and cultures to explore what it means to cultivate a family today, across borders, religions, and race.

In these buoyant and inventive stories, Karen Tei Yamashita transfers classic tales across boundaries and questions what an inheritance - familial, cultural, emotional, artistic - really means. In a California of the '60s and '70s, characters examine the contents of deceased relatives' freezers, tape-record high school locker-room chatter, or collect a community's gossip while cleaning the teeth of its inhabitants.

Much like Lee Chang-dong’s internationally renowned films (Burning, Secret Sunshine, and Poetry), these brilliant, unsettling tales, originally published in Korea in the 1980s and now translated into English for the first time, investigate themes of injustice, betrayal, and terror—on both an intimate and national scale. Lee writes deeply and hauntingly about conflicts between family, the powerful and the vulnerable, conformists and rebels.

Equal parts fantastical—a pair of talking dolls help twins escape a stifling home, a heart boils on the stove as part of an elaborate cure for melancholy, a fox demon contemplates avenging her sister's death—and true to life—a mother and daughter try to heal their rift when the daughter falls unexpectedly pregnant, a woman reexamines her father's legacy after his death—the stories in this collection are hopeful and heartbreaking, full of danger and full of joy.

Plant Your Feet Firmly is an intimate glimpse of Asian America. Through the pages of seven short stories, the listener is treated to a delicate taste of ordinary people living extraordinary lives - from a cool grandpa to a grieving mother to a disillusioned husband.

Vivid, vibrant, and unwaveringly affecting, The Best Possible Experience brings us intimate, impeccably realized accounts of individuals living in one of the most populous countries in the world, and its American diaspora, all haunted, in every sense of the word, by a loss of home. Classically elegant in prose and consistently modern in outlook, Injam’s stories question what it means to have a home, to return home, and show, above all, that home is not a place so much as a people ready to accept you as you are.

Opal Chen reunites with her Chinese sisters after forty years; newly cosmopolitan Lulu Koo wonders why Americans “like to walk around in the woods with the mosquitoes”; Hong Kong parents go to extreme lengths to reestablish contact with their “number-one daughter” in New York; and Betty Koo, brought up on “no politics, just make money,” finds she must reassess her mother’s philosophy. With their profound compassion and equally profound humor, these eleven linked stories trace the intimate ways in which humans make and are made by history.

Samrat Upadhyay's thrilling new collection brings stories of thieves, lovers, political prisoners, fractured families, and of Nepali-Americans attempting to navigate the strange customs of the United States. It reaffirms Upadhyay's brilliant contributions to the international literature of exile.

From a Hong Kong movie idol fleeing a sex scandal to an obedient daughter turned Stanford pretender, from a Chinatown elder summoned to his village to a Korean American pastor with a secret agenda, the characters in the collection illustrate the conflict between self and society, tradition and change. In "What We Have Is What We Need", winner of the Atlantic's Student Writing Contest, a boy from Mexico reunites with his parents in San Francisco. When he suspects his mother has found love elsewhere, he fights to keep his family together.

In 16 remarkable stories, Chaya Bhuvaneswar spotlights diverse women of color - cunning, bold, and resolute - facing sexual harassment and racial violence, and occasionally inflicting that violence on each other.