Read Together
Tastes Like War: A Memoir
- Book by Grace M. Cho
- Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction
The book connects Grace mother's mental illness to the trauma of war and racism, using the act of cooking traditional Korean dishes as a way for the author to connect with her mother and understand her past.
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
- Book by Cathy Park Hong
- Pulitzer Prize finalist
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. Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship in a search to both uncover and speak the truth.
Nightbitch
- Novel by Rachel Yoder
One day, the mother was a mother but then, one night, she was quite suddenly something else...
At home full-time with her two-year-old son, an artist finds she is struggling. She is lonely and exhausted. She had imagined - what was it she had imagined? Her husband, always travelling for his work, calls her from faraway hotel rooms. One more toddler bedtime, and she fears she might lose her mind.
Instead, quite suddenly, she starts gaining things, surprising things that happen one night when her child will not sleep. Sharper canines. Strange new patches of hair. New appetites, new instincts. And from deep within herself, a new voice...