Jimin Han was born in Seoul, Korea and grew up in New York, Rhode Island, and Ohio. Her writing can be found online at NPR’s “Weekend America,” Poets & Writers Magazine, Entropy, The Rumpus, KoreanAmericanStory.com, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, A Small Revolution, was published last year. She teaches at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College and lives outside New York City with her husband and children.
At age 32, Michael Seidlinger is about to drop his 10th novel (he also has a poetry collection and a best-selling nonfiction book that was published last year). His latest, titled My Pet Serial Killer, explores the boundaries of power and the need for human connection.
In her debut novel, THE INCENDIARIES, R.O. Kwon gives new meaning to the concept of a love triangle. Set on a college campus, we’re introduced to Will, a student who knows a thing or two about fervor, talks about an explosion and sets into motion questions about how that came to be.
Kirstin Chen’s book, Bury What We Cannot Take, is a return to the historical era of early communism in China. Five members of a family struggle with choices they’re forced to make in a rapidly shifting political landscape: a grand matriarch set in her ways with a hidden loss, her clumsy, trusting 9-year-old granddaughter; her politically passionate 12-year-old grandson; her absent son; her obedient daughter-in-law — and each is pushed to face his or her worst fears in a story of survival, shame and abiding love.
For May, we bring you the gripping opening pages of Jimin Han's debut novel, A Small Revolution, out May 1. Weaving back and forth in time, covering love, loss, democracy, and two continents, the novel opens with a startling premise: four young women are held hostage by a gunman at a small college. The protagonist, Yoona, knows the man, and she has a complicated history with him. What unfolds is equal measure suspensful and poignant.
— Karissa Chen, Senior Literature Editor
What if you were an incarcerated Japanese American citizen in World War II and were later freed by a victorious Japanese Imperial Army? This is how Peter Tieryas’s latest novel, The United States of Japan, begins, as characters Ruth Ishimura and Ezekiel Song find themselves hopeful and uncertain at the impending birth of their son, Beniko.
