Books by Korean-American Authors

 

Thanks to Grace Fell, senior publicist at Spark Point Studio for the ebook on NetGalley and the hard copy of Kinda Korean by Joan Sung (February 25, She Writes Press). Grace recommends the memoir as perfect for Korean American Day (January 13) 

Very personal stories about growing up in America with Korean immigrant parents.

Publisher description of Kinda Korean :

For fans Minor Feelings | Korean diaspora | Coming-of-age angst & pain

Torn between her two identities as a Korean woman and a first-generation American, Sung bares her struggles in an honest and bare confessional. From her experiences with microaggressions to the over-fetishization of Asian women, Sung connects the COVID pandemic with the decades of violence and racism experienced by Asian American communities through her research on race and representation.

 

Joan Sung breaks the generational silence that curses her family in this courageous memoir of parental love, inter- generational trauma, and perseverance. By intentionally overcoming the stereotype that all Asians are quiet, Sung tells her stories of coming-of-age with a Tiger Mom who did not understand American society.

Cathy Park Hong was born to Korean immigrants in 1976 and raised in a bilingual home. She recalls her childhood in Los Angeles as a “profoundly lonely experience,” during which she first began to comprehend the cultural invisibility of Asian Americans in the United States.Jan 14, 2022

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, FINALIST FOR PULITZER PRIZE, WINNER OF NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD, AMERICAN BOOK AWARD, ONE OF BEST TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE OF 2021

Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE • A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness

“Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

In development as a television series starring and adapted by Greta Lee • One of Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Year • Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, New Statesman, BuzzFeed, Esquire, The New York Public Library, and Book Riot

Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong fearlessly and provocatively blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose fresh truths about racialized consciousness in America. Part memoir and part cultural criticism, this collection is vulnerable, humorous, and provocative—and its relentless and riveting pursuit of vital questions around family and friendship, art and politics, identity and individuality, will change the way you think about our world.

Binding these essays together is Hong’s theory of “minor feelings.” As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these “minor feelings” occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you’re told about your own racial identity. Minor feelings are not small, they’re dissonant—and in their tension Hong finds the key to the questions that haunt her. 

With sly humor and a poet’s searching mind, Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This intimate and devastating book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and female friendship. A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche—and of a writer’s search to both uncover and speak the truth.