Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month Reading List


Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Reading List

The CARL BRANDON SOCIETY recommends the following speculative fiction books for Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month:

  • Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
    A collection of stories from one of American speculative fiction’s most precise and beautiful writers.
     
  • Atomik Aztek by Sesshu Foster
    An Aztec prince or a Los Angeles meatpacker? The protagonist travels back and forth between two alternative realities, never sure which is real.
     
  • Hopeful Monsters by Hiromi Goto
    Wonderful stories by the author of The Kappa Child.
     
  • Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
    In a dystopian England, three children discover that they are clones produced to provide organs to the sick.
     
  • Salt Fish Girl by Larissa Lai
    Science fiction set in a dystopian near future in which corporate enclaves house lucky employees, leaving most of humanity to deal with increasingly strange ecological developments.
     
  • The Poet’s Journey by Amirthi Mohanraj (illustrated by Kat Beyer)
    A young poet sets out into the wide world on a journey to find poetry; with the help of a few magical creatures, she finds more than she ever expected.
     
  • Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
    Mad experiments with the unleashed potential of the dreaming brain.
     
  • Of Love and Other Monsters by Vandana Singh
    The main character wakes up from a fire and doesn’t know who he is, but can sense and manipulate the minds of others. He is not alone in this ability. Singh takes us on a metamind ride.
     
  • The Arrival by Shaun Tan
    A wordless graphic novel about immigration and displacement.
     
  • On the Other Side of the Eye by Bryan Thao Worra
    Speculative poems that take us from the secret wars of the CIA in Laos to the secret edges of the human soul and the universe.

This list was compiled from recommendations by Carl Brandon Society members on our list-serve. National Hispanic Heritage Month will begin on Sept. 15, and American Indian Heritage Month is in November. We’ll be soliciting recommendations for books for these months as well. Also, don’t forget to check out our Black History Month list.