Austin Ku

"Paper Names explores what it means to be American from three different perspectives. There’s Tony, a Chinese-born engineer turned Manhattan doorman, who immigrated to the United States to give his family a better life. His daughter, Tammy, who we meet at age nine and follow through adulthood, and who grapples with the expectations of a first generation American and her own personal desires. Finally, there’s Oliver, a handsome white lawyer with...

"Tang Yitian has been living in America for almost a decade when he receives an urgent phone call from his mother: his father has disappeared from the family’s rural village in China. Though they have been estranged for years, Yitian promises to come home. When Yitian attempts to piece together what may have happened, he struggles to navigate China’s impenetrable bureaucracy as an outsider, and his mother’s evasiveness only deepens the mystery....

"From the visionary author of The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, an epic novel tracing the conception and construction of a colossal statue--and the lives of two centuries of immigrants navigating its turbulent wake. "Lidia Yuknavitch is a writer who, with each ever more triumphant book, creates a new language with which she writes the audacious stories only she can tell," Roxane Gay has written. Now, Yuknavitch bridges the nineteenth...