Jean Kyoung Frazier is the author of the debut novel Pizza Girl (on sale now!). In a recent interview with Literary Arts’ Amanda Bullock, Frazier shared some books that she has been reading–and loving–lately. Her picks are below.
LISTEN to their interview in this episode of Long Distance from Literary Arts’ The Archive Project.
Note: In their talk, Frazier and Bullock elevated the importance of supporting Black-owned independent bookstores, especially during this COVID-19 pandemic, so we’ve linked to numerous Black-owned indies from around the country below.
How Much of These Hills is Gold
by C Pam Zhang
From Penguin Random House: An electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home.
Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.
Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it’s about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.
Order your copy of How Much of These Hills is Gold from a Black-owned indie bookstore:
Eso Won Books (Los Angeles, CA) | Loyalty Bookstore (Washington, D.C.) | The Lit Bar (Bronx, NY)
Days of Distraction
by Alexandra Chang
From HarperCollins: A wry, tender portrait of a young woman—finally free to decide her own path, but unsure if she knows herself well enough to choose wisely—from a captivating new literary voice.
The plan is to leave. As for how, when, to where, and even why—she doesn’t know yet. So begins a journey for the twenty-four-year-old narrator of Days of Distraction. As a staff writer at a prestigious tech publication, she reports on the achievements of smug Silicon Valley billionaires and start-up bros while her own request for a raise gets bumped from manager to manager. And when her longtime boyfriend, J, decides to move to a quiet upstate New York town for grad school, she sees an excuse to cut and run.
Moving is supposed to be a grand gesture of her commitment to J and a way to reshape her sense of self. But in the process, she finds herself facing misgivings about her role in an interracial relationship. Captivated by the stories of her ancestors and other Asian Americans in history, she must confront a question at the core of her identity: What does it mean to exist in a society that does not notice or understand you?
Order your copy of Days of Distraction from a Black-owned indie bookstore:
Fulton Street Books & Coffee (Tulsa, OK) | The Dock Bookshop (Dallas-Fort Worth, TX) | Books and Crannies (Martinsville, VA)
Chemistry
by Weike Wang
From Penguin Random House: At first glance, the quirky, overworked narrator of Weike Wang’s debut novel seems to be on the cusp of a perfect life: she is studying for a prestigious PhD in chemistry that will make her Chinese parents proud (or at least satisfied), and her successful, supportive boyfriend has just proposed to her. But instead of feeling hopeful, she is wracked with ambivalence: the long, demanding hours at the lab have created an exquisite pressure cooker, and she doesn’t know how to answer the marriage question. When it all becomes too much and her life plan veers off course, she finds herself on a new path of discoveries about everything she thought she knew.
Smart, moving, and always funny, this unique coming-of-age story is certain to evoke a winning reaction.
Order your copy of Chemistry from a Black-owned indie bookstore:
Semicolon Bookstore & Gallery (Chicago, IL) | Underground Books (Sacramento, CA) | Uncle Bobbie’s (Philadelphia, PA)
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
by Ottessa Moshfegh
From Penguin Random House: From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
Order your copy of My Year of Rest and Relaxation from a Black-owned indie bookstore:
Eclectuals (Long Beach, CA) | Black Pearl Books (Austin, TX) | Black Stone Bookstore & Cultural Center (Ypsilanti, MI)
The Idiot
by Elif Batuman
From Penguin Random House: A portrait of the artist as a young woman. A novel about not just discovering but inventing oneself.
The year is 1995, and email is new. Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard. She signs up for classes in subjects she has never heard of, befriends her charismatic and worldly Serbian classmate, Svetlana, and, almost by accident, begins corresponding with Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. Selin may have barely spoken to Ivan, but with each email they exchange, the act of writing seems to take on new and increasingly mysterious meanings.
At the end of the school year, Ivan goes to Budapest for the summer, and Selin heads to the Hungarian countryside, to teach English in a program run by one of Ivan’s friends. On the way, she spends two weeks visiting Paris with Svetlana. Selin’s summer in Europe does not resonate with anything she has previously heard about the typical experiences of American college students, or indeed of any other kinds of people. For Selin, this is a journey further inside herself: a coming to grips with the ineffable and exhilarating confusion of first love, and with the growing consciousness that she is doomed to become a writer.
Order your copy of The Idiot from a Black-owned indie bookstore:
Elizabeth’s Bookshop & Writing Centre (Akron, OH) | 44th & 3rd Bookseller (Atlanta, GA) | Loyalty Bookstore (Washington, D.C.)
“Home is, I think, a sense of complete belonging, a place where you feel your right to exist in your truest form isn’t questioned. That means my definition of a home is necessarily small: a room, a smell, a person.”
C Pam Zhang
