May is Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, which celebrates the lives and contributions of inspiring Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders through various mediums. In honor of the holiday, here are 8 books from Asian American and Pacific Islander authors that you should include on your reading list…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!
The Sympathizer: A Novel

by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Kindle price: $9.30

The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is the breakthrough novel of the year. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Saul Bellow, 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 arranges to come 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 espionage novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.

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To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before

by Jenny Han
Kindle price: $8.99

What if all the crushes you ever had found out how you felt about them…all at once?

Sixteen-year-old Lara Jean Song keeps her love letters in a hatbox her mother gave her. They aren’t love letters that anyone else wrote for her; these are ones she’s written. One for every boy she’s ever loved—five in all. When she writes, she pours out her heart and soul and says all the things she would never say in real life, because her letters are for her eyes only. Until the day her secret letters are mailed, and suddenly, Lara Jean’s love life goes from imaginary to out of control.

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Pachinko

by Min Jin Lee
Kindle price: $9.99

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant–and that her lover is married–she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations.

Richly told and profoundly moving, Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters–strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis–survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.

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Little Fires Everywhere: A Novel

by Celeste Ng
Kindle price: $9.99

From the bestselling author of Everything I Never Told You, a riveting novel that traces the intertwined fates of the picture-perfect Richardson family and the enigmatic mother and daughter who upend their lives.

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned—from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren—an enigmatic artist and single mother—who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.

Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood—and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.

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Internment

by Samira Ahmed
Kindle price: $9.99

Rebellions are built on hope.
Set in a horrifying near-future United States, seventeen-year-old Layla Amin and her parents are forced into an internment camp for Muslim American citizens.
With the help of newly made friends also trapped within the internment camp, her boyfriend on the outside, and an unexpected alliance, Layla begins a journey to fight for freedom, leading a revolution against the camp’s Director and his guards.
Heart-racing and emotional, Internment challenges readers to fight complicit silence that exists in our society today.

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I Love You So Mochi

by Sarah Kuhn
Kindle price: $10.99

Kimi Nakamura loves a good fashion statement.

She’s obsessed with transforming everyday ephemera into Kimi Originals: bold outfits that make her and her friends feel like the Ultimate versions of themselves. But her mother disapproves, and when they get into an explosive fight, Kimi’s entire future seems on the verge of falling apart. So when a surprise letter comes in the mail from Kimi’s estranged grandparents, inviting her to Kyoto for spring break, she seizes the opportunity to get away from the disaster of her life.

When she arrives in Japan, she’s met with a culture both familiar and completely foreign to her. She loses herself in the city’s outdoor markets, art installations, and cherry blossom festival — and meets Akira, a cute aspiring med student who moonlights as a costumed mochi mascot. And what begins as a trip to escape her problems quickly becomes a way for Kimi to learn more about the mother she left behind, and to figure out where her own heart lies.

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The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

by Maxine Hong Kingston
Kindle price: $11.99

In her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form—an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American.

As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother’s “talk stories.” The fierce and wily women warriors of her mother’s tales clash jarringly with the harsh reality of female oppression out of which they come. Kingston’s sense of self emerges in the mystifying gaps in these stories, which she learns to fill with stories of her own. A warrior of words, she forges fractured myths and memories into an incandescent whole, achieving a new understanding of her family’s past and her own present.

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Patron Saints of Nothing

by Randy Ribay
Kindle price: $8.99

A powerful coming-of-age story about grief, guilt, and the risks a Filipino-American teenager takes to uncover the truth about his cousin’s murder.

Jay Reguero plans to spend the last semester of his senior year playing video games before heading to the University of Michigan in the fall. But when he discovers that his Filipino cousin Jun was murdered as part of President Duterte’s war on drugs, and no one in the family wants to talk about what happened, Jay travels to the Philippines to find out the real story.

Hoping to uncover more about Jun and the events that led to his death, Jay is forced to reckon with the many sides of his cousin before he can face the whole horrible truth — and the part he played in it.

As gripping as it is lyrical, Patron Saints of Nothing is a page-turning portrayal of the struggle to reconcile faith, family, and immigrant identity.

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Amazon will be releasing a Kindle Paperwhite 4 Hunger Games bundle on June 10th, according to Michael Kozlowski from GoodEreader… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The original has a picture of a gold mockingjay with an arrow, the color scheme is predominately black. The sequel case has a green color scheme with a series of circles and a gold bird, sitting on a branch. One of the biggest key selling points about this entire bundle is a free six month subscription to Kindle Unlimited, where you can read the Hunger Games novels.

The original series of the Hunger Games was one of the best selling trilogy of all time. The publisher and all of the online bookstores sold millions of copies in hardcover, paperback and ebooks. Everyone is betting the farm on the new prequel novel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which will revisit the world of Panem sixty-four years before the events of The Hunger Games, starting on the morning of the reaping of the Tenth Hunger Games.

The Hunger Games Bundle is retailing for $159 for the 8GB model with Special Offers and 32GB for $189.

Read full post on GoodEreader

Here’s what you need to know about The Ballad of Songbirds And Snakes, according to Carly Mallenbaum from USA Today… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

If you read the “Hunger Games” books, you know the character Coriolanus Snow as the dictatorial president of Panem who wears roses on his lapels and antagonizes Katniss Everdeen. But what was the slick Snow (who’s played by Donald Sutherland in the movies) like as an 18-year-old student?

As you’d expect, he was a clever and high-achieving student. As you might not expect, he had a soft side.

Suzanne Collins explores Snow’s back story, and plenty more, in her 500-plus page “Hunger Games” prequel novel, “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” released Tuesday.

Here’s what else you need to know about the book, which is set 64 years before the events of the original “Hunger Games” novel that was released in 2008.

Katniss is mentioned only in reference to a plant
Miss Katniss Everdeen (played by Jennifer Lawrence in the films)? She doesn’t exist in this book, which is set decades before she volunteers as tribute. The word “katniss” is used only when referencing a flowering plant that grows potatoes. However, there will be some names in the prequel readers will recognize. Among them: Lucretius Flickerman, who shares a last name with the Hunger Games host from the original trilogy, Caesar Flickerman (played by Stanley Tucci).

The origin of the annual Hunger Games is explained
How did the child-murdering competition start? “Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” explains the origin of the Hunger Games and depicts an early contest in which Snow serves as student mentor for a tribute. The book explores early additions of customs that went on to be expected at the Games, including the broadcasting of tribute interviews, gambling over victors and the unleashing of mutated animals into the arena.

Snow disdained the mockingjay long ago
Even before Katniss became the symbolic Mockingjay, a rebel of the Capitol, Snow disliked the hybrid bird for reasons that had nothing to do with the skilled archer. We also learn how the mockingjay – and the mimicking, spying jabberjays – came to be.

Read full post on USA Today

In a world rights agreement, Simon & Schuster’s Stuart Roberts bought The Gucci Mane Guide to Greatness, according to Rachel Deahl from Publishers Weekly…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The book is a follow-up to Gucci Mane’s bestselling 2017 memoir, The Autobiography of Gucci Mane (also published by S&S). The platinum-selling rapper was represented by Robert Guinsler at Sterling Lord Literistic. Describing the book, which is slated for October 13, S&S said it is Gucci Mane’s “playbook for living your best life, offering an unprecedented look at his secrets to success, health, wealth, and self-improvement.”

Read full post on Publishers Weekly

According to Aiden Wynn from Stylist.co, Callum Manning was bullied for starting an Instagram page to review books. Thousands of people heard his story and followed it immediately!  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The internet isn’t always the kindest place. 13-year-old Callum Manning from South Shields found that out the hard way when the book review Instagram account he was running became a target for online bullying. Students at his new school saw the Instagram account and started a group chat to make fun of it and, by extension, him. For added cruelty, they then added Callum to the chat so that he could see what they were saying about him.

But, in spite of stories like this, the internet can also be pretty wonderful. After finding out what happened, Callum’s sister Ellis took to Twitter to lament the cruelty of the kids who were bullying her brother. She tweeted that she couldn’t believe “how awful kids are”, and said that the bullies had been calling her brother a “creep” and mocking him for the account and his love of books.

That tweet ended up making the rounds though, and it currently has 24.5K retweets and 189K likes.

But going viral isn’t where this story ends. Her tweet has been seen by some big names, and since posting at the end of last month it has had responses from #Merky Books, Neil Gaiman, and Malorie Blackman, to name just a few. Callum has also been offered free books from authors including Matt Haig, and theatre tickets from the Shakespeare’s Globe Twitter account.

Not only that, but Callum’s Instagram account went from having only a few followers to having 361K. They’re very active followers too, with hundreds and sometimes thousands of people commenting on every post. They act as a great antidote to the bullies who tried to trample his spirit, by flooding his account with messages of support and encouragement.

Read full post on Stylist.co

Colson Whitehead is now the fourth author in history to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction twice. According to Maureen Lee Lenker of EW, the author joins Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike in this exclusive club…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Colson Whitehead joins Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, and John Updike in this exclusive club. It was announced Monday that he won for his book The Nickel Boys, a heart-rending depiction of abuse in a juvenile reform school. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett and The Topeka School by Ben Lerner were the other finalists in the category.

Basing the novel on the real Dozier School in Florida, Whitehead delves into the realities of living under Jim Crow laws in the American South. Judges for the Pulitzer wrote, “[It is] a spare and devastating exploration of abuse at a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida that is ultimately a powerful tale of human perseverance, dignity and redemption.”

The author previously told EW of the book, “Whether you’re a young black man in Florida in 1962, or a young black man in 1986 in New York City, like I was, you can be caught up in the snare of law enforcement at any time. In a split second, your life can change.”

Whitehead previously won for 2016’s The Underground Railroad, which was a veritable literary phenomenon. In addition to the Pulitzer, The Underground Railroad won him a National Book Award, was selected for Oprah’s Book Club, and sold more than one million copies. Moonlight’s Barry Jenkins is also set to direct a TV adaptation for Amazon.

Read full post on EW.com

The coronavirus pandemic has forced the cancellation of the 40th annual Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike Contest in Key West, according to the New York Times…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

The three-night competition, which had been scheduled for July 23-25, typically attracts more than 100 burly, bearded contestants from U.S. and international locales to Sloppy Joe’s Bar, but organizers were concerned about staging the contest amid packed crowds. Besides the throngs of spectators, most contestants are between 60 and 80 years old, presenting a potentially risky situation since that age group is especially susceptible to COVID-19, organizers said.

The next contest is scheduled for July 22-24, 2021.

The contest is traditionally the highlight of the Hemingway Days festival, held around the author’s July 21 birthday each year to salute his literary prowess and Key West lifestyle. Other festivities generally include literary readings, symposium presentations, a street fair and a marlin tournament that recalls Hemingway’s passion for angling.

Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Key West throughout most of the 1930s, wrote many of his best-known works in the second-story studio that adjoins his former home, now a museum. They include “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “To Have and Have Not.”

Read full post on The New York Times