This May, and every day, Denver Public Library aims to uplift the histories, cultures, and contributions of Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AA.NH/PI) communities.
See a full list of these books in our catalog.
Selecting individual titles from the lists below will show you DPL holdings in different formats.
Fiction Books | Nonfiction Books
In this explosive horror novel, a woman is haunted by inner trauma, hungry ghosts, and a serial killer as she confronts the brutal violence experienced by East Asians during the pandemic.
Like navigating a monkey bridge—a bridge, built of spindly bamboo, used by peasants for centuries—the narrative traverses perilously between worlds past and present, East and West, in telling two interlocking stories: one, the Vietnamese version of the classic immigrant experience in America, told by a young girl; and the second, a dark tale of betrayal, political intrigue, family secrets, and revenge—her mother’s tale. The haunting and beautiful terrain of Monkey Bridge is the “luminous motion,” as it is called in Vietnamese myth and legend, between generations, encompassing Vietnamese lore, history, and dreams of the past as well as of the future.
From the award-winning author of Flux comes a dazzling novel about love, family, and the art of sushi that asks: What if you could return to the point of a fateful choice, wiser than before, and find the courage to forge a new path?
From the critically-acclaimed author of Disorientation, a multi-genre story collection that explores the limits and possibilities of storytelling. A mail order bride from Taiwan is packed up in a cardboard box and sent via express shipping to California, where her much older husband awaits her. Two teenage girls meticulously plan how to kill and cook their downstairs neighbor. An American au pair moves to Paris to find herself, only to find her actual French doppelgänger. A father reunites with his estranged daughter in unusual circumstances: as a background actor on the set of her film.
Lin Chong is an expert arms instructor, training the Emperor's soldiers in sword and truncheon, battle axe and spear, lance and crossbow. Unlike bolder friends who flirt with challenging the unequal hierarchies and values of Imperial society, she believes in keeping her head down and doing her job. Until a powerful man with a vendetta rips that carefully-built life away. Disgraced, tattooed as a criminal, and on the run from an Imperial Marshall who will stop at nothing to see her dead, Lin Chong is recruited by the Bandits of Liangshan.
Intimately tied to the Hawaiian Islands, This is Paradise explores the relationships among native Hawaiians, local citizens, and emigrants from (and to) the contiguous forty-eight states. There is tension between locals and tourists, between locals and the military men that populate their communities, between local Hawaiian girls who never leave, and those who do so for higher education and then return. Kahakauwila is a careful observer of her protagonists' actions - and, sometimes, their inaction. Her portrayal of people whose lives have lost their center of gravity is acute, often heartbreaking, and suffused with a deeply felt empathy.
With her life in disarray after her Appa's extramarital affair and subsequent departure, Ji-won, plagued by horrifying yet enticing dreams of bloody rooms full of eyes, is overcome by hunger and rage that can only be sated by deceit, manipulation and murder as victims accumulate around her college campus.
Monica Tsai spends her days analyzing data for a new computer program that seeks to connect strangers with the world around them. But one day the very program she's helping to build pings a result for her beloved grandmother Yun's long-estranged cousin: a photograph of two women in Shanghai. One of them, Louise Sun, is a digital archivist who holds keys to Yun's past, and whose gift of a single pencil upends Monica's day-to-day. Monica's discoveries of a hidden family history are exquisitely braided with her grandmother Yun's own memories, recounting her time growing up in the Phoenix Pencil Company in the 1940s.
In 1986, the teenage daughter of a wealthy family gets lost in an abandoned rubber plantation while fleeing her angry father and is forever changed by the experience. In 2009, pressed into a dangerous scheme by a former lover, a woman captures a rare two-headed cobra. And in 2011, a young, unhappy American living in Saigon with her sort-of boyfriend, disappears without a trace. Over the course of the novel, the fates of these three women will lock together in an exhilarating series of nested narratives.
Six is 6'7," scheming to rejoin the starting lineup, and barely checks her phone. Green is 6'1," always building her brand, and secretly jealous of her more famous girlfriend. Together, they're going where no Asian American trans woman has gone before: the men's pro indoor volleyball league. Our hot girls with balls just thought playing with the boys would spare them some controversy--ha, ha. In between their rival teams' away games across the globe, Six and Green stay connected on SpaceTime and selflessly broadcast their romance to fans on their weekly Instagraph live show.
When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle into life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father. Over time, Huong realizes she will never see Cong again. While she copes with this loss, her sons, Tuan and Binh, grow up in their absent father's shadow, haunted by a man and a country trapped in their memory and imagination.
With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who comes to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping spy novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.
"... An electrifying novel-in-stories that follows a cast of intricately linked characters as their lives and relationships dramatically transform in the wake of rejection.
Edie is done with crime. Eight years in prison changes a person. Particularly when you're only there because your partner, your best friend, your all-but-sister, sold you down the river. Even getting Edie out on early parole doesn't earn Angel any forgiveness. That's why Edie knows they'll turn down Angel's offer of a job. One last, big score. A chance to take down the man who put them away: Joyce Atlas. But Edie's lost too much time with their family. A heavily pregnant sister, a seriously ill niece, and a nephew who wasn't born before they went to prison. There's not a question. Edie's going straight. Or trying to...
No Country for Eight-Spotted Butterflies is a collection of soulful ruminations about love, loss, struggle, resilience and power. Part memoir, part manifesto, the book is both a coming-of-age story and a call for justice-for everyone but, in particular, for indigenous peoples-his own and others.
Sarah Ahn's viral food videos of her and her mom have captivated millions of viewers with their behind-the-scenes look at Korean cooking and multigenerational home life. This collaboration is now a must-have cookbook blending the emotional intimacy of Crying in H Mart with practical culinary advice from Nam Soon's lifetime of kitchen experience. The recipes are framed by mother-daughter conversations that are funny, profound, and universally relatable-plus all the food is backed by the recipe-testing power of America's Test Kitchen.
In his highly anticipated second collection, Chen Chen continues his investigation of family, both blood and chosen, examining what one inherits and what one invents, as a queer Asian American living through an era of Trump, mass shootings, and the COVID-19 pandemic.
In his late thirties, Jeff Chu left his job as a magazine writer and enrolled at Princeton Seminary's "Farminary," a 21-acre farm where students learn to work the earth while interrogating life's biggest questions. Now he unfolds what he learned about creating good soil-both literally and figuratively-drawing lessons from the chickens, goats, and zinnias and the rhythms of growth, decay, and regeneration that define life on the land. In a series of reflections, Chu introduces us to the cast of characters, human and not, who became his teachers.
By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as a radio producer at This American Life and had won an Emmy. But behind her office door she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk. After years of questioning what was wrong with her, she was diagnosed with Complex PTSD-a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years. Both of Stephanie's parents had abandoned her as a teenager after years of physical and verbal abuse and neglect. She thought she'd overcome her trauma, but her diagnosis illuminated the ways in which her past continued to threaten her health, her relationships, and her career.
Shibui introduces readers to a transformative Japanese approach to aging that celebrates the subtle beauty, wisdom, and joy that emerge with time. Through engaging personal essays, watercolor illustrations, and practical activities, Japanese-American author Sanae Ishida presents a refreshing alternative to Western anti-aging messages. Each chapter explores a different dimension of aging beautifully: beauty (bi), health (kenkou), purpose (mokuteki), wealth (tomi), connection (tsunagari), and approaching life's end (owari).
A posthumous collection of over 200 breathtaking photographs that document the history and cultural impact of the Asian American social justice movement, through the lens of beloved photographer Corky Lee--the man who sought to change the world one photograph at a time Using his camera as his pen and sword, Corky Lee documented Asian American-Pacific Islander communities for fifty continuous years, breaking the stereotype of Asian Americans as docile, passive, and, above all, foreign to this country.
The acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut is a memoir about coming of age as a queer, biracial teenager within the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where cult-like privilege, shocking social and racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hide in plain sight. As a child in Florida, T Kira Madden lived a life of extravagance--from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoes, she had plenty to envy. But beneath the surface, life in "the rat's mouth" of Boca Raton was dangerous.
Turning Japanese is an illustrated memoir that chronicles MariNaomi's experiences working in illegal hostess bars in San Jose and Tokyo while attempting to connect with a culture that had eluded her since childhood.
In Family Thai, Arnold breaks down an often-intimidating cuisine into accessible building blocks for every home cook, beginning with pantry staples--what's fish sauce? what are the differences between soy sauces?--and moving on to teaching readers essential skills like how to steam the perfect sticky rice or how to make their own noodles if they can't find them stocked nearby. Arnold also shares what he likes to cook at home and adaptations of Thai cuisine that have been inspired by his hometown of Nashville and his travels around the world.
Chantha Nguon recounts her life as a Cambodia refugee who lost everything and everyone--her house her country, her parents, her siblings, her friends--everything but the memories of her mother's kitchen, the tastes and aromas of the foods her mother made before the dictator Pol Pot tore her country apart.
Since its publication in the early nineteenth century, this long narrative poem has stood unchallenged as the supreme masterpiece of Vietnamese literature. Huynh's new and absorbingly readable translation (on pages facing the Vietnamese text) is illuminated by notes that give comparative passages from the Chinese novel on which the poem was based, details on Chinese allusions, and literal translations with background information explaining Vietnamese proverbs and folk sayings.
Nonbinary manga artist Poppy Pesuyama is excited when forms offer the option to choose "neither" for gender and thrilled about their new job working as an assistant for manga artist X! But then he sexually harasses them, treating them first like a girl and then like something less than human. It only lasts a few months, but in some ways it never ends. Born into a body they hate and still reeling from the abuse they faced seven years ago, Pesuyama begins to rail at their past, their friends, and even their mother as they try to come to terms with who they are and what happened to them.
A memoir in essays about love and allyship, told through one Asian and Black interracial marriage.
"A ... memoir by 25-year-old Ly Tran about her immigrant experience and her recent family history in the aftermath of the war that spans from Vietnam to Brooklyn, and ultimately to the Ivy League.
Ocean Vuong’s first full-length collection aims straight for the perennial “big”—and very human—subjects of romance, family, memory, grief, war, and melancholia. None of these he allows to overwhelm his spirit or his poems, which demonstrate, through breath and cadence and unrepentant enthrallment, that a gentle palm on a chest can calm the fiercest hungers.
Drawing on a collection of original essays, previously published work, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more, Alice uses her unique talent to share an impressionistic scrapbook of her life as an Asian American disabled activist, community organizer, media maker, and dreamer. From her love of food and pop culture to her unwavering commitment to dismantling systemic ableism, Alice shares her thoughts on creativity, access, power, care, the pandemic, mortality, and the future.
Tiffany Yu celebrates the power of stories and lived experiences to foster the proximity, intimacy, and humanity of disability identities that have far too often been 'othered' and rendered invisible. ... Organized from the personal to the professional, the domestic to the political, the Me to the We to the Us, [this book] frames context for conversations, breaks down the language of ableism, identifies microaggressions, and proposes real actions that lead to genuine and authentic allyship"-- Provided by publisher.
Celebrate Khmer and Cambodian American cuisine with award-winning chef and restauranteur Nite Yun with over 100 recipes of the food she grew up and fell in love with over the years.