Asian Studies - Non-Asian Language Resources

Written in the form of a graphic novel, the book tells the story of Mandy, a second generation Indian born and brought up in Chicago. He is as American as they come: hot dogs, French fries, baseball and a love of all things American. But he undergoes a metamorphosis during a forced trip to India, at the end of which he chooses to be an Indian by choice.

The Ramayana, one of the great legends of ancient India, is presented here in the form of a visually stunning and gripping graphic novel. Told from the perspective of the queen, Sita, it explores ideas of right vs. wrong, compassion, loyalty, trust, honor and the terrible price that war exacts from women, children, animals and the natural world.

Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956), one of India's foremost revolutionaries, grew up untouchable. Throughout his life Ambedkar faced routine discrimination: in school; in Baroda after his return from Columbia University; and while travelling in later life. This discrimination continues to haunt a majority of India's 170 million Dalits.

Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back! is a comics anthology by 14 women of their day-to-day experiences in India. Produced out of a week-long workshop with Indian women artists, both amateur and professional, Drawing the Line is part of a larger national conversation in India around sexual discrimination.

The title of this book, Aranyaka, meaning 'of the forest', alludes to a set of 3,000-year-old Vedic scriptures full of mysterious metaphors, composed after the Samhitas (hymn collections), alongside the Brahmanas (ritual manuals), but before the Upanishads (philosophical expositions).

Caldecott Medalist Allen Say presents a stunning graphic novel chronicling his journey as an artist during WWII, when he apprenticed under Noro Shinpei, Japan's premier cartoonist whom he came to love as his "spiritual father." As WWII raged, Allen was inspired to consider questions of his own heritage and the motivations of those around him.

Yaichi is a work-at-home suburban dad in contemporary Tokyo, married to wife Natsuki, father to young daughter Kana. Their lives are suddenly upended with the arrival at their doorstep of a hulking, affable Canadian named Mike Flanagan, who declares himself the widower of Yaichi's estranged gay twin, Ryoji.

A Japanese manga legend Yoshiharu Tsuge is one of most celebrated and influential artists, but his work has been almost entirely unavailable to English-speaking audiences. The Man Without Talent, his first book ever to be translated into English, is an unforgiving self-portrait of frustration. Swearing off cartooning as a profession, Tsuge takes on a series of unconventional jobs hoping to find success among the hucksters and deadbeats he does business with.

In this heartwarming and award-winning manga originally known as Metamorphose no Engawa, an elderly woman and a high school girl develop a beautiful friendship through their shared passion for Boys' Love.

The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud collects the best short stories from Kuniko Tsurita's remarkable career. While the works of her male peers in literary manga are widely reprinted, this formally ambitious and poetic female voice is like none other currently available to an English readership.

A celebrated masterwork shimmering with vulnerability from one of alt-manga's most important female artists. Set in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Tokyo, Talk to My Back (1981-84) explores the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams through a woman's relationship with her two daughters as they mature and assert their independence, and with her husband, who works late and sees his wife as little more than a domestic servant.

Anxiety and longing suffuse incisive portraits of postwar Japan. Nazuna Saito began making comics late. She was in her forties when she submitted a story to a major Japanese publishing house and won an award for newcomers. She continued to work through the 1990s. Offshore Lightning collects Saito's early work and two later graphic novellas.

The year is 1995. Turning Japanese follows the 22-year-old half-Japanese Mari from Northern California to Tokyo, Japan, as she tries to get by in an unfamiliar city with rudimentary language skills--all in the hopes of finally connecting with her Japanese relatives without the use of her mother as a translator.

The wife of Japan's most lauded manga artist documents a year in their lives with her own artistry. Drawn in a simple, personable style, and covering the same years fictionalized in Tsuge's final masterpiece The Man Without Talent, Fujiwara's journal focuses on the joys of daily life amidst the stresses of childrearing, housekeeping, and managing a depressed husband.

Guy Delisle became one of the few Westerners to be allowed access to the fortress-like country when he was working in animation for a French company. While living in the nation's capital for two months on a work visa, Delisle observed everything he was allowed to see of the culture and lives of the few North Koreans he encountered, bringing a sardonic and skeptical perspective on a place rife with propaganda.

A story of the enduring quality of female friendship amid a gritty landscape of abuse. "Against gorgeous, starkly sketched city scenes of South Korean alleyways and hostess bars, the rebellions and secret longings of '90s teenager Pearl and her group of "bad friends" play out in this imported debut discovery."

Ancco expertly renders the moment of suspension between the desire to grow up and the fear that accompanies it. Autobiography blends with fiction in these coming-of-age stories about people reckoning with their place in their community and women coming to terms with other women. Ancco delivers a cutting panorama of contemporary Korean society that's much darker than one might expect, while also brimming with life and the vitality of youth.

Discover the illustrations that inspired the historic, Oscar-winning film's every shot in this graphic novel drawn by the director Bong Joon Ho himself. With hundreds of mesmerizing illustrations, this is a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the making of one of the best films in years and a brand-new way to experience a global phenomenon.

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim was an adult when her mother revealed a family secret: She had been separated from her sister during the Korean War. Her mother's story inspired Gendry-Kim to begin interviewing her and other Koreans separated by the war; that research fueled a deeply resonant graphic novel.

The year is 1951. Twenty-year-old wallflower Lee Kyung ekes out a living at the US Post Exchange, where goods and services of varying stripe are available for purchase. When a handsome young northern escapee and erstwhile fine artist is hired despite waning demand, an unlikely friendship blossoms into a young woman's first brush with desire against the backdrop of the Korean War at its most devastating.

What does it take for ordinary citizens to risk everything to protest living under a repressive government? What takes them beyond the brink, to the "boiling point"? In his graphic novel 100°C, celebrated webtoon and comics artist Choi Kyu-sok sheds a light on these questions by examining the lives of one family caught up in the great social unrest that developed under Chun Doo-hwan's regime and culminated in the June 1987 Uprising.

A single volume collection of the landmark novel by Joe Sacco. Palestine was based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s, where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews. With a foreword by Edward Said, his work has often been lauded for its ability to brilliantly navigate such socially and politically sensitive subject matter within the confines of the comic book medium.

Here, in one volume: Marjane Satrapi's best-selling, internationally acclaimed graphic memoir of growing up as a girl in Iran during the revolution has for 20 years been a classroom staple, a feminist manifesto and one of the most popular and widely known graphic novels of all time. Edgy, searingly observant and candid, Persepolis is a stunning work from one of the most highly regarded, singularly talented graphic artists at work today.

When Zeina was born, the civil war in Lebanon had been going on for six years, so it's just a normal part of life for her and her parents and little brother. When Zeina's parents don't return one afternoon from a visit to the other half of the city and the bombing grows ever closer, the neighbors in her apartment building create a world indoors for Zeina and her brother where it's comfy and safe, where they can share cooking lessons and games and gossip.

In Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, Delisle explores the complexities of a city that represents so much to so many. He eloquently examines the impact of the conflict on the lives of people on both sides of the wall while drolly recounting the quotidian: checkpoints, traffic jams and holidays.

The Arab of the Future tells the unforgettable story of Riad Sattouf's childhood, spent in the shadows of 3 dictators: Muammar Gaddafi, Hafez al-Assad and his father. In a striking virtuoso graphic style that captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervor of political idealism, Riad Sattouf recounts his nomadic childhood growing up in rural France, Gaddafi's Libya and Assad's Syria--but always under the roof of his father, a Syrian Pan-Arabist.

Poppies of Iraq is Brigitte Findakly's nuanced tender chronicle of her relationship with her homeland Iraq, co-written and drawn by her husband, the acclaimed cartoonist Lewis Trondheim. In spare and elegant detail, they share memories of her middle class childhood touching on cultural practices, the education system, Saddam Hussein's state control and her family's history as Orthodox Christians in the Arab world.

Mohammad Sabaaneh, a talented political cartoonist from Palestine, has gained worldwide renown for his stark black-and-white sketches. This collection includes 120 of Sabaaneh's best cartoons on Palestinians' popular resistance.

A graphic memoir about growing up in the Philippines in the 1980s with Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Imelda Marcos and the EDSA Revolution. Weaving the past with the present, Mapa entertains with stories about religion, pop culture, adolescence, social class and politics, including her experiences of the 1986 People Power Revolution which made headlines around the world.

The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigated her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid.

Immerse yourself in a high-stakes fantasy adventure set in the Philippines! This Philippine National Book Award winner fuses traditional myth and magic with contemporary action. Borrowing elements from The Lord of the Rings and The Phantom Tollbooth, author and creator Arnold Arre reinvents age-old Filipino fables, constructing a rich world of fantasy and adventure for a new generation.

The English translation of this bestselling graphic novel tells the story of Nok, an old blind man who sells lottery tickets in Bangkok, as he decides to leave the city and return to his native village. Through reflections on contemporary Bangkok and flashbacks to his past, Nok reconstructs a journey through the slums of migrant workers, the rice fields of Isaan, the tourist villages of Ko Pha Ngan, and the Red Shirt protests of 2010.

This riveting, beautifully produced graphic memoir tells the story of the early years of the Vietnam War as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Marco, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French wife. The family is called back to Saigon in 1961, where the father becomes President Ngo Dinh Diem's personal interpreter; as the growing conflict between North and South intensifies, so does turmoil within Marco's family.

This beautifully illustrated and emotional story is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Exploring the anguish of immigration and the lasting effects that displacement has on a child and her family, Bui documents the story of her family's daring escape after the fall of South Vietnam in the 1970s, and the difficulties they faced building new lives for themselves.

In this gorgeous debut graphic novel, fairy tales are the only way one boy can communicate with his Vietnamese immigrant parents. But how will he find the words to tell them that he's gay? A powerful read about family, identity and the enduring magic of stories.

40 Men and 12 Rifles is an expansive, gripping graphic novel set in Indochina in the year leading up to 1954, when the French-held garrison at Dien Bien Phu fell after a 4-month battle, leading to the end of the first Indochina war between French forces and Ho Chi Minh's nationalist rebels.

A moving young adult graphic memoir about a Vietnamese immigrant boy's search for belonging in America. Thien's first memory isn't a sight or a sound. It's the sweetness of watermelon and the saltiness of fish. It's the taste of the foods he ate while adrift at sea as his family fled Vietnam.