New Books to Read for AAPI Month and Beyond

Here, an accomplished actress and an attractive younger man meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. Who they are to each other is a question that Kitamura’s narrative unfurls, except it extends the question to all relationships. It looks at the dynamics—or roles—we have with different people in our lives, showing how we’re constantly auditioning, even with people who think they know us best.

“Hammajang” is explained in the official blurb as being a word from Hawaiian pidgin that means chaotic or messed up, which describes Edie’s situation perfectly. She just got done spending eight years on an icy prison planet, and it was all because of Angel. And Angel is exactly who she sees when she steps into freedom after getting early parole. Angel has one last job that involves a trillionaire tech god, and it’s really tempting.

Vara, author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated The Immortal King Rao, explores the long-lasting effects of having AI-powered technology communicating like human beings. She uses the viral essay about her sister’s death that she composed with the help of ChatGPT, as well as her history using online chat rooms as a teen to look at how technology has changed the way we communicate, and how we can use it to our actual benefit (and not just some corporate entity’s).

This has to be one of the juiciest-sounding gothic novels ever. It, like any other gothic novel worth its salt, starts with a death, Vivian Yin’s specifically. Yin was a trailblazing starlet and the first Chinese actress to win an Oscar, but spent the latter years of her life as a recluse in a sprawling California garden estate. When she dies, her daughters expect to inherit her home, but a last minute will change grants it to an estranged family member. So now both sides of the family move into the mansion to lay a claim to it. But there are questions about what happened in the last week’s of Vivian’s life, and something sinister is haunting her mansion’s halls.