Asians, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islanders in Indiana and at IU

In ALL I SHOULD NOT TELL, Conner Grayson, fourteen, wants nothing more than to see, Cudge, his intensely abusive step-father destroyed. He considers it a blessing for himself and his younger, too-innocent, brother, Sammy, when the man disappears, though he's convinced that his mother has done something unspeakable to her husband. With Cudge gone, there's no threat of exposing Conner's deepest secret, his love for Mark, another boy in Orgull, a fictional river town outside of Louisville. But almost immediately, Mark disappears as well. Flash forward two decades. Conner remains tortured about his past, including the apparent suicides of his biological father and his brother. But, he has found a certain level of happiness with the family he's built with his wife, Lamb, as well as his boyfriend, James. It's complicated. When Cudge's octogenarian father shows up from California to investigate Cudge's long ago disappearance, Conner spirals into a series of unwise decisions culminating in discoveries about his past that may destroy his current family. It might be there's only one person who can pull him from the wreckage. Fiction. Literary Fiction. LGBTQ+ Studies. Mystery.

Winner of the 2023 PEN Translation Prize Shortlisted for the 2023 NSW Premier's Translation Prize An eerie, alienating, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic short story collection about Americans in America by one of Indonesia's most prominent writers, now in an English translation for its fortieth anniversary, with a foreword by Intan Paramaditha A Penguin Classic In these seven stories of People from Bloomington, our peculiar narrators find themselves in the most peculiar of circumstances and encounter the most peculiar of people. Set in Bloomington, Indiana, where the author lived as a graduate student in the 1970s, this is far from the idyllic portrait of small-town America. Rather, sectioned into apartment units and rented rooms, and gridded by long empty streets and distances traversable only by car, it's a place where the solitary can all too easily remain solitary; where people can at once be obsessively curious about others, yet fail to form genuine connections with anyone. The characters feel their loneliness acutely and yet deliberately estrange others. Budi Darma paints a realist world portrayed through an absurdist frame, morbid and funny at the same time. For decades, Budi Darma has influenced and inspired many writers, artists, filmmakers, and readers in Indonesia, yet his stories transcend time and place. With The People from Bloomington, Budi Darma draws us to a universality recognized by readers around the world-the cruelty of life and the difficulties that people face in relating to one another while negotiating their own identities. The stories are not about "strangeness" in the sense of culture, race, and nationality. Instead, they are a statement about how everyone, regardless of nationality or race, is strange, and subject to the same tortures, suspicions, yearnings, and peculiarities of the mind.

A fourth collection from a prize-winning poet whose "gift is breathtaking" (Naomi Shihab Nye) Eugene Gloria's Sightseer in This Killing City captures the surreal and disorienting feelings of the present. In the wake of recent presidential elections in the United States and in the Philippines, Gloria's latest collection sharpens his obsession with arrivals and departures, gun violence, displacement, cultural legacy, and the bitter divisions in America. Through the voice of Nacirema, the central persona of the collection, we are introduced to a character who chooses mystery and inhabits landscapes fraught with beauty and brutality. Gloria quotes melodies from seventies soul and jazz, blending the urban lament of Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane with the idiom of Stevie Wonder and Fela Kuti. Sightseer in this Killing City is an argument for grace and perseverance in an era of bombast and bullies.

JL Kato is a retired newspaper copy editor. His poetry collection, Shadows Set in Concrete, was selected as a Best Book of Indiana in 2011. A longtime ambassador of the literary arts, he was chosen as 2022 Literary Champion by the Indiana Authors Awards.

While growing up in Versailles, an Indiana farm community, Linda Furiya tried to balance the outside world of Midwestern America with the Japanese traditions of her home life.  As the only Asian family in a tiny township, Furiya's life revolved around Japanese food and the extraordinary lengths her parents went to in order to gather the ingredients needed to prepare it. As immigrants, her parents approached the challenges of living in America, and maintaining their Japanese diets, with optimism and gusto. Furiva, meanwhile, was acutely aware of how food set her apart from her peers: She spent her first day of school hiding in the girls' restroom, examining her rice balls and chopsticks, and longing for a Peanut Bullter and Jelly sandwich. Bento Box in the Heartland is an insightful and reflective coming-of-age tale.  Beautifully written, each chapter is accompanied by a family recipe of mouth-watering Japanese comfort food.

In her second book Wider Than the Sky, Nancy Chen Long grapples with the porous and slippery nature of memory and mind. Through form and content, the poems in the book mimic memory, its recursive and sometimes surreal qualities—how recalling one memory resurrects a different memory, which then jumps to another memory, and then another, each memory connected by the thinnest of wisps—as well as memory’s mutability—conflicting memories among family members, changes in the collective memory of a society, a buried memory that is resurrected when one catches the scent of a forgotten perfume. Wider Than the Sky explores the role of memory in identity, how the physical aspects of the brain impact who we are, and how who we are—both individually and as a society—is, in one sense, a narrative. These poems delve into the mind’s need for narrative in order to make sense of the world and how a society uses stories and myth to help its members remember a lesson, a preferred behavior, or their position in the social scale.

IU English professor Samrat Upadhyay's new collection vibrates at the edges of intersecting cultures. Journalists in Kathmandu are targeted by the government. A Nepali man studying in America drops out of school and finds himself a part of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. A white American woman moves to Nepal and changes her name. A Nepali man falls in love with a mysterious foreign black woman. A rich kid is caught up in his own fantasies of poverty and bank robbery. In the title story, a powerful woman, the owner of a construction company, becomes a political prisoner, and in stark and unflinching prose we see both her world and her mind radically remade. Through the course of the stories in this collection, Upadhyay builds new modes of seeing our interconnected contemporary world. A collection of formal inventiveness, heartbreak and hope, it reaffirms Upadhyay's position as one or our most important chroniclers of globalization and exile.

Becoming AppalAsian is a homage to Lisa Kwong's parents, ancestors, ancestral land, homeland, and chosen land. China influences the cadence through which she experiences all spaces, whether that be Radford, Virginia where she worked as a waitress in her parents' restaurant or in Bloomington, Indiana as an artist and academic in a predominantly white University town. Lisa carries the pride of her father's quest to achieve the American Dream as a Chinese immigrant as well as the triumph and turmoil of defying stereotypes in a western landscape. She is AppalAsian: a Southern woman of Asian descent raised in Appalachia who lays claim to soul food, a Southern drawl, chicken feet, and dumplings. Her poetry offers fresh language to express the complexities of her identity. -Ciara Miller, author of Silver Bullet and founder/CEO of Miller's Learning Center (Chicago)