“The ecology and economy of the region is under threat. This Transpacific Literary Project folio, Monsoon Notebook is for these essential, vanishing, and unruly waters.”

We all want to be / remembered, either in stone or by name – / hence the oath / we swear to paper, hence the / incompleteness of life / with incomplete papers

In a new collection from A World Without Cages, seven writers reflect on building a different future while holding the weight of the past

In the Texas prison system, my name is Chino. You will not know who I am unless you are immediate family or one of my few friends.

Question: with sharp enough clippers, can you help / any tree grow small? With sharp enough clippers, can you outlive your / kids?

‘I was pushing myself to write from places that terrified me.’

“The process of writing a novel can sound cohesive and tidy. At the time it feels much more like walking around in a very dark and very cluttered room, moving slowly, hoping you’ll run into something like an intention instead of a sharp object, or more often, a wall.”

i say “i don’t need a man” and it’s true/ but flowers. the flowers how i love the flowers / before they drown inside out / from their own perfume.

The first time I had a mangosteen, at a night market in Shanghai, my aunt taught me to open it by pressing my thumbs in and pulling it apart. It was absolutely eerie–it split down the middle and opened like an eye.

Sometimes, I only want to eat the skin.

If I have a son / with his mother’s eyes / then will there still be room / for me under his tongue?

One of the challenges in this novel was to figure out a way in which time can be manipulated the way it’s so interestingly manipulated in film.

Now sitting behind barbed wire, hugging his knees / looking at the sky, the earth, the clouds / a bird’s wing like a far-fetched dream.

“The very moment I thought I was lost / My dungeon shook and the chains fell off.”

The author of trans(re)lating house one talks translation, mapping Tehran, and writing through the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election.

The green fruit would collect on the ground before we threw them to be devoured with the fervor we reserved for galas and granny smiths.

“Giving women voice” does not necessarily mean they will be heard or believed. From feminist refusal in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life to the quiet resistance of comfort women statues.

To fix myself, it seems, is to become a ghost of myself.

Fearing the fruit cutting expectations of Korean mother-in-laws

When they called me spoiled, they meant that I was a rotten fruit, left out to waste in the humidity, sullied by forces beyond their control.