Ruth Ozeki

"A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being After the tragic death his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house-a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their...

Jane a female Japanese-American filmmaker, hired to produce a television program aimed at Japanese housewives extolling the pleasures of meat consumption, begins to have second thoughts about the dangers of meat and the practices of the meat industry. At the same time, Akiko, the abused wife of Jane's Japanese boss begins to question her role as a docile Japanese housewife when she views some of the "typical" Americans Jane is using in her television...

First published in 1956, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment behind them. It was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of Japanese American writers and scholars recognized the novel's importance and popularized it as one of literature's most powerful testaments to the Asian American experience. No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life "no-no...