My Mother Called Me Unni
My Mother Called Me Unni

Author: Dr. Venugopal K. Menon

Publisher: Outskirts Press

Published: 2015-11-24

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1478761717

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"A fascinating and admirable history. The detailed and descriptive chapters in this book create entire cultural worlds for readers to learn from, enjoy, and remember." -Chitra Divakaruni, international award-winning and bestselling author, Houston, TX.*** “An inspiring story, a wonderful saga of a migrant in America.” —Tom Reid, Mayor of Pearland, TX.*** “An engaging memoir of a doctor, an Indian American.” —Aseem Chhabra, columnist for India Abroad, NY.*** “Provides an interesting reading of a diasporic longing for home.” —Professor Sanoo Master, writer, critic, humanist, Kerala, India.*** “Unbelievable…interesting and fascinating reading.” —Padma Shri Dr. Vyjayanthimala Bali, dancer, actress, former MP, Chennai, India.*** “Remarkable journey from his native land of India to America.” —John K. Graham, MD, D. Min, President/CEO, ISH., Houston, TX.*** “Enjoyable and authentic descriptions; touching; impressive.” —Padma Vibhushan, professor, physicist, Dr. E.C.G. Sudarshan, Austin, TX.***

Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.
Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related.

Author: Jenny Heijun Wills

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Published: 2021-02-16

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0771070918

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Winner of the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction A beautiful and haunting memoir of kinship and culture rediscovered. Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first family and returned to Seoul where she spent four months getting to know other adoptees, as well as her Korean mother, father, siblings, and extended family. At the guesthouse for transnational adoptees where she lived, alliances were troubled by violence and fraught with the trauma of separation and of cultural illiteracy. Unsurprisingly, heartbreakingly, Wills found that her nascent relationships with her family were similarly fraught. Ten years later, Wills sustains close ties with her Korean family. Her Korean parents and her younger sister attended her wedding in Montreal, and that same sister now lives in Canada. Remarkably, meeting Jenny caused her birth parents to reunite after having been estranged since her adoption. Little by little, Jenny Heijun Wills is learning and relearning her stories and those of her biological kin, piecing together a fragmented life into something resembling a whole. Delving into gender, class, racial, and ethnic complexities, as well as into the complex relationships between Korean women--sisters, mothers and daughters, grandmothers and grandchildren, aunts and nieces--Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related. describes in visceral, lyrical prose the painful ripple effects that follow a child's removal from a family, and the rewards that can flow from both struggle and forgiveness.

I Went To See My Father
I Went To See My Father

Author: Kyung-Sook Shin

Publisher: Astra Publishing House

Published: 2023-04-11

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1662601379

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An instant bestseller in Korea and the follow up to the international bestseller, Please Look After Mom; centering on a woman’s efforts to reconnect with her aging father, uncovering long-held family secrets. Two years after losing her daughter in a tragic accident, Hon finally returns to her home in the countryside to take care of her father. At first, her father only appears withdrawn and fragile, an aging man, awkward but kind around his own daughter. Then, after stumbling upon a chest of letters, Hon discovers the truth of her father’s past and reconstructs her own family history. Consumed with her own grief, Hon had been blind to her father’s vulnerability and her family’s fragility. Unraveling secret after secret and thanks to conversations with loving family and friends, Hon grows closer to her father, who proves to be more complex than she ever gave him credit for. After living through one of the most tumultuous times in Korean history, her father’s life was once vibrant and ambitious, but spiraled during the postwar years. Now, after years of emotional isolation, Hon learns the whole truth, from her father’s affair and involvement in a religious sect, to the dynamic lives of her own siblings, to her family’s financial hardships. What Hon uncovers about her father builds towards her understanding of the great scope of his sacrifice and heroism, and of his generation as a whole. More than just the portrait of a single man, I Went to See My Father opens a window onto humankind, family, loss, and war. With this long-awaited follow-up to Please Look After Mom—flawlessly rendered by award-winning translator Anton Hur—Kyung-Sook Shin has crafted an ambitious, global, epic, and lasting novel.

My Struggle: Book 4
My Struggle: Book 4

Author: Karl Ove Knausgaard

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2016-04-19

Total Pages: 513

ISBN-13: 0374534179

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My Struggle: Book 4 finds an eighteen-year-old Karl Ove Knausgaard in a tiny fishing village in northern Norway, where he has been hired as a schoolteacher and is living on his own for the first time. When the ferocious winter takes hold, Karl Ove--in the company of the H fjord locals, a warm and earthy group who have spent their lives working, drinking, and joking together in close quarters--confronts private demons, reels from humiliations, and is elated by small victories. We are immersed, along with Karl Ove, in this world--sometimes claustrophobic, sometimes serenely beautiful--where memories and physical obsessions burn throughout the endless Arctic winter. In Book 4, Karl Ove must weigh the realities of his new life as a writer against everything he had believed it would be.

Obligations and Aspirations
Obligations and Aspirations

Author: Kim Jai Sook Martin

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2014-05-15

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1491730900

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Kim Jai Sook Martin entered the world in 1935, during the Japanese occupation of her native Korea. She was the second daughter of an ordinary family, born to parents who had hoped for a boy; they dressed her as one until she was three, when her brother was born. By the age of six, she had already learned the price of her fierce independence: refusing to acknowledge the Japanese flag as the Korean national flag, she was denied entrance to her first year of school. This early conflict set Kim Jai Sook on a lifetime quest to understand her obligations to her family, her culture, her country, herself, and, ultimately, to God. Hers is a story of perseverance, turmoil, and love, as she fought to maintain balance between duty and her own desires. She set her goals high. As the survivor of Japanese subjugation and two wars, she committed herself to living as a responsible and worthy person. As an adult, in pursuit of her deep desire to become a teacher, she left Korea and built a new life in Canada, where her fathers advice on dealing with people became her guiding principles. This is her story.

I Met Loh Kiwan
I Met Loh Kiwan

Author: Cho Haejin

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2019-08-31

Total Pages: 135

ISBN-13: 0824880404

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This poignant short novel follows North Korean refugee Loh Kiwan to a place where he doesn’t speak the language or understand the customs. His story of hardship and determination is gradually revealed in flashbacks by the narrator, Kim, a writer for a South Korean TV show, who learned about Loh from a news report. She traces his progress from North Korea to Brussels to London as he struggles to make his way and find a home in an unfamiliar world. Readers come to see that Kim, too, has embarked on a journey, one driven by her need to understand what drives people to live, even thrive, despite tremendous loss and despair. Her own conflicted feelings of personal and professional guilt are mirrored in the novel’s other characters: Jae, Kim’s romantic interest and producer of the TV show she once wrote for; Yunju, a young cancer victim whose illness she now regrets exploiting; Pak, a doctor who helped Loh in Brussels, yet suffers deep remorse over the many life and death decisions he has made for his patients. Cho Haejin weaves these characters into a story of hope and trust, one that asks basic questions about what it means to be human and humane. First published in 2011 in South Korea, this timely book won the 2013 Shin Dong-yup Prize for Literature.

Beware Beware
Beware Beware

Author: Steph Cha

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2014-08-12

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1250049016

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"Working as an apprentice at a P.I. firm, Juniper Song finds herself nose deep in a Hollywood murder scandal where the lies may be more glamorous than most, but the truths they cover are just as ugly. When a young woman named Daphne Freamon calls looking for an eye on her boyfriend, her boss punts the client to Song. Daphne is an independently wealthy painter living in New York, and her boyfriend Jamie Landon is a freelance screenwriter in Los Angeles, ghostwriting a vanity project for aging movie star Joe Tilley. Song quickly learns that there's more to this case than a simple tail, and her suspicions are confirmed when Tilley winds up dead in a hotel room"--Dust jacket.

Blood Sisters
Blood Sisters

Author: Kim Yideum

Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

Published: 2019-06-11

Total Pages: 139

ISBN-13: 1941920780

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Blood Sisters tells the story of Jeong Yeoul, a young Korean college student in the 1980's, when the memory of President Chun Doohwan's violent suppression of student demonstrations against martial law was still fresh. Yideum captures with raw honesty the sense of dread felt by many Korean women during this time as Jeong struggles in a swirl of misguided desires and hopelessness against a society distorted by competing ideologies, sexual violence, and cultural conservatism. Facing this helplessness, her impulse is to escape into the world of art. Blood Sisters is a vivid, powerful portrayal of a woman’s efforts to live an authentic life in the face of injustice.

Awaken Children Vol. 7
Awaken Children Vol. 7

Author: Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi

Publisher: M A Center

Published: 2014-11-09

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 1680370146

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Amma's Enlightening Conversations Have Been Faithfully Recorded In The Awaken Children Series. This Book, The Seventh Volume Of Awaken Children, Is The Quintessence Of Vedanta. It Is A Sure Way To Lead A Most Happy And Successful Life. Each Word Is Profound And Contains The Whole Of Spirituality And Life. Reading This Book Could Be A Meditation, A Glimpse Into One’s Own Inner Self. The Events In This Book, For The Most Part, Took Place Between The Beginning Of October 1984 And January 1986. We Can Find Amma's Teachings On A Variety Of Subjects Such As: Not The Limited Self But The Infinite Atman; The Mind Is Mad; The Ego Lives On Attention; Sakshi Bhava, The State Of Witnessing; The Real Center Is Within; Be Fully Conscious; The Power To Witness Exists Within; Mother, The Sarvasakshi; The Infinite Power Of The Self; The Mind Is A Big Lie; The Two Powers Of The Mind; Attachment Is A Disease; The Necessity Of Tapas; How To Listen; Is Religion Responsible For The Conflicts Of The Present Day; Religion And Spirituality; The Highest Peak Of Human Existence; It Takes Courage To Surrender; The Ego Kills The Real You; Beauty Lies In Egolessness. Translated By Swami Amritaswarupananda. Published By The Disciples Of Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, Affectionately Known As Mother, Or Amma The Hugging Saint.

My Days in Solitude
My Days in Solitude

Author: Annie Issac

Publisher: Notion Press

Published: 2020-11-03

Total Pages: 43

ISBN-13: 1648929680

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As the world was shrinking to within the four walls of home for almost everyone across the world, a young scientist in Hyderabad discovers herself. Having had people around her all her life, Annie finds it difficult to adjust to the aloneness in the beginning. Over the next few weeks, what happens is a journey through her life, people and circumstances that made her what she is today. Family is the foundation on which she stands on, and friends are the pillars from whom she draws strength. A short and impactful recounting of the years of struggle, joy, disappointments and success. Today, she stands strong and firm. Happy at where she is, looking forward to whatever life brings, ready to take it head-on.