A conversation with Julie Otsuka

A conversation with Weike Wang about humor, Joan is Okay, and writing.

When my mother and I were hopeless, buckling under the weight of our unanswered prayers, she taught me that laughter can be a way of creating our own mercy.

‘did I ever tell the teacher / we invented a new language that a pair of six year olds spoke fluent / appeasement she pointed to the globe told me to tell him / this is the world and that is America’

Author Jade Chang talks about her new novel ‘The Wangs vs. the World,’ subverting righteous immigrant stories, and asshole as an endearing term.

The author of ‘Deceit and Other Possibilities’ on mischievous writing, how journalism feeds fiction, and getting to that “good place” in a short story

Coming to terms with my mixed-race heritage as a kid in Southern California’s largest Asian enclave

A guide to help you get from here to there while Arab — from speaking Arabic to passing the salt

‘You’ve memorized its bends like a prayer, / its long silver-gray hair, / its cigarettes, its favorite / songs and curse words, / the holes in its shirts.’

It was just the right and wrong moment to leave, to go to China, to live in a country where the weight of blackness might not hinder your breathing. And yet, there were things you were afraid of losing.

‘but what if it was something once / vulnerable, downy, and warm? // something severed or stillborn? // something with pulse and blood / and breath bitten right out of it?’

A conversation about humor, race, and the search for decolonized jokes

An interview with spoken word duo DarkMatter on radical desis, the legacy of Partition, Twitter poems and The Perks of Being a Wallflower

How to say milk? How to say sand, snow, sow, / linen, cloud, cocoon, or albino?

With the novelist who long thought she was a Korean American impostor

Link bait for the Monday-challenged.

It’s the year 2352, and the Walrusoids are at it again, speculating over divorce, SB 1070, some tall Asian guy named Jeremy Lin, and movie theater masturbation.

“Only when the Imperial Wang—or as they say in English, “The Wang of Wangs,” is shoved directly in the face of the public, will the Emperor’s potency be fully apparent.”

“Fry these days! Maybe he had been exposed to too many pesticides as an egg.”

Various communications methods are being developed: email, SMS, etc. Do you think the letter is replaceable?

“Assume the fish are swimming in clean, pollution-free water. Assume any cloudiness to be a consequence of naturally occurring solvents or debris.”

In the year 2352, they scratch their heads over Instagram, Mitt Romney, Kony, and Siri.