"Emotionally complex and filled with passion. I am sure it will captivate readers from East and West." "Vann has a unique knowledge of Japan." Winner of the Wattys Award. An unforgettable, breathless debut fiction by author Vann Chow, THE PACHINKO GIRL is the winning selection of an international book award with over one hundred forty thousand submissions. While the book appears to be a murder mystery, the author explores and exposes a slew of human rights issues such as gender inequality, hyper-sexualization of teens, homosexual discrimination, racial discrimination, and workplace bullying among others in Japan through the eyes of a foreigner with his friends from different walks of lives and professions in her seminal debut fiction series.Synopsis: An American businessman Smith who loved to linger in Pachinko parlors every night in his lonely life as a foreigner in Tokyo met Misa, a young Japanese hostess working there by chance. He quickly found out that Misa was entangled into a web of gang-controlled business operations that involved illegal drugs distribution, money laundering and prostitution beneath the harmless facade of Pachinko casinos. Knowing her personal woes, he gave her his winnings to help her out to survive a difficult patch and change paths. That large sum of money quickly incriminated them to false accusation of sex trade. Meanwhile, a film director Tanaka investigated the death of his idol Sergey Ribery, the legendary French arthouse movie-maker who happened to have filmed Misa in his last work in which she was seemingly strangled to death in the story. Tanaka sought the help of a psychologist who may shed some light into the strange casts of characters involved in the case, but the doctor was later murdered. Who did this? And what was he or she trying to cover up?

THE KISS OF THE PACHINKO GIRL is the second part of the story that started with the award-winning PACHINKO psychological thriller series. While the book series is an exciting crime fiction series, it also explores and exposes a slew of human rights issues such as gender inequality, hyper-sexualization of teens, homosexual discrimination, racial discrimination, and workplace bullying among others in Japan through the eyes of a foreigner with his friends from different walks of lives and professions. In The Kiss of the Pachinko Girl, American expat Carson Smith and movie-maker Ryuji Tanaka revealed their personal stories and motivations. The unexpected disappearance of the mysterious central character, Misa Hiyami led them to journey across Japan to find the ultimate truth that has been eluding them about the true murderer of Sergey Ribery and Misa's true identity. Is she a victim of feudal society and unspeakable crimes, or is she....a cold-blood killer?

Winner of the 2016 Whiting Award One of Publishers Weekly's "Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2016" One of Lit Hub's "10 must-read poetry collections for April" “Reading Vuong is like watching a fish move: he manages the varied currents of English with muscled intuition. His poems are by turns graceful and wonderstruck. His lines are both long and short, his pose narrative and lyric, his diction formal and insouciant. From the outside, Vuong has fashioned a poetry of inclusion.”—The New Yorker "Night Sky with Exit Wounds establishes Vuong as a fierce new talent to be reckoned with...This book is a masterpiece that captures, with elegance, the raw sorrows and joys of human existence."—Buzzfeed's "Most Exciting New Books of 2016" "This original, sprightly wordsmith of tumbling pulsing phrases pushes poetry to a new level...A stunning introduction to a young poet who writes with both assurance and vulnerability. Visceral, tender and lyrical, fleet and agile, these poems unflinchingly face the legacies of violence and cultural displacement but they also assume a position of wonder before the world.”—2016 Whiting Award citation "Night Sky with Exit Wounds is the kind of book that soon becomes worn with love. You will want to crease every page to come back to it, to underline every other line because each word resonates with power."—LitHub "Vuong’s powerful voice explores passion, violence, history, identity—all with a tremendous humanity."—Slate “In his impressive debut collection, Vuong, a 2014 Ruth Lilly fellow, writes beauty into—and culls from—individual, familial, and historical traumas. Vuong exists as both observer and observed throughout the book as he explores deeply personal themes such as poverty, depression, queer sexuality, domestic abuse, and the various forms of violence inflicted on his family during the Vietnam War. Poems float and strike in equal measure as the poet strives to transform pain into clarity. Managing this balance becomes the crux of the collection, as when he writes, ‘Your father is only your father/ until one of you forgets. Like how the spine/ won’t remember its wings/ no matter how many times our knees/ kiss the pavement.’”—Publishers Weekly "What a treasure [Ocean Vuong] is to us. What a perfume he's crushed and rendered of his heart and soul. What a gift this book is."—Li-Young Lee Torso of Air Suppose you do change your life. & the body is more than a portion of night—sealed with bruises. Suppose you woke & found your shadow replaced by a black wolf. The boy, beautiful & gone. So you take the knife to the wall instead. You carve & carve until a coin of light appears & you get to look in, at last, on happiness. The eye staring back from the other side— waiting. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Ocean Vuong attended Brooklyn College. He is the author of two chapbooks as well as a full-length collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. A 2014 Ruth Lilly Fellow and winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, Ocean Vuong lives in New York City, New York.

A gripping psychological thriller with police procedural twists and turns that will keep fans of bestselling authors Mike Omer (Abbey Mullen series), Robert Dugoni (Tracy Crosswhite), and Karin Slaughter (Grant County) turning the pages until the jaw-dropping end. A sister's worst nightmare. A homicide detective's destiny. Everybody loves Claire's little sister, Tina. But only Claire sees the twisted psychopath hiding behind her sister's angelic face. When Tina is brutally murdered on her fourteenth birthday, the day Claire failed to walk her home from school, Claire never forgives herself. And neither does their mother. Twelve years later, Claire, now a police detective, returns to Newburgh to solve the mystery of her sister's death. When more girls turn up dead exactly like Tina, Claire suspects that her sister's murderer is still on the prowl. But this is no ordinary serial killer. The murders stump the team of FBI agents and a forensic psychiatrist assisting the investigation, including Special Agent Robert Cline-a former FBI hostage negotiator and Claire's old flame. As the evidence piles up, Claire's troubled childhood comes back to haunt her. She becomes the lead suspect in the murder investigation, and the system turns against her. Unable to trust anyone-not even herself-Claire must break every rule in the book to save the next girl. With time running out in this nerve-shredding psychological thriller and harrowing family drama, a shocking discovery changes everything. Is Claire's sister truly dead-or is she playing one final lethal prank?

This is a history of the Japanese art world from 1990 up to the tsunami of March 2011, and its struggle to find a voice amidst Japan's economic decline and China's economic ascent. It looks at how the pop-culture fantasies of Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara and the other artists of the Superflat movement came to dominate the art of Japan today. It also delves into what lies behind their imagery of a childish and decadent society unable to face reality.

An American business man who liked to linger in Pachinko parlor every night in his lonely life as a foreigner in the city of Tokyo met Misa, a young Japanese hostess that worked at a Pachinko parlor by chance. Knowing her personal woes, he gave her his winning as an exchange for Japanese lessons. That large sum of money incriminated them to false accuse of sex trade. Meanwhile, an ex-adult film producer investigated the death of a certain foreign producer who happened to have filmed Misa in his legendary work, in which she was seemingly strangled to death. The White Man and the Pachinko Girl is book one in the Tokyo Faces series by Vann Chow, an epic tale between two persons, the American man named Smith and the Japanese girl Misa, whose paths crossed in the mystical modern city of Japan.