Fiction. Literary Nonfiction. Cross-Genre. Art. Asian American Studies. Tan Lin's INSOMNIA AND THE AUNT is an ambient novel composed of black and white photographs, postcards, Google reverse searches, letters, appendices, an index to an imaginary novel, reruns, and footnotes. The aunt in question can't sleep. She runs a motel in the Pacific Northwest. She likes watching Conan O'Brien late at night. She may be the narrator's aunt or she may be an emanation of a TV set. Structured like everybody's scrapbook, and blending fiction with nonfictional events, INSOMNIA AND THE AUNT is about identities taken and given up, and about the passions of an immigrant life, rebroadcast as furniture. Ostensibly about a young man's disintegrating memory of his most fascinating relative, or potentially a conceptualist take on immigrant literature, it is probably just a treatment for a prime-time event that, because no one sleeps in motels, lasts into the late night and daytime slots.

There are few grand narratives that loom over Asian Americans more than the "model minority." While many Asian Americanist scholars and activists are quick to disprove the model minority as "myth," author Takeo Rivera instead rethinks the model minority as cultural politics. Rather thandisproving the model minority, Rivera instead argues that Asian Americans have formulated their racial and gendered subjectivities in relation to the model minority relation that Rivera terms "model minority masochism." With specific attention to hegemonic masculine Asian American culturalproduction, Rivera details two complementary forms of contemporary racial masochism: a self-subjugating masochism which embraces the model minority, and its opposite, a self-flagellating masochism that punishes oneself for having been associated with the model minority at all.

A debut YA American epic and historical adventure from Melissa Ostrom about striking out for your own destiny. She's not the girl everyone expects her to be. Harriet Winter is the eldest daughter in a farming family in New Hampshire, 1807. She is expected to help with her younger sisters. To pitch in with the cooking and cleaning. And to marry her neighbor, the farmer Daniel Long. Harriet’s mother sees Daniel as a good match, but Harriet doesn’t want someone else to choose her path—in love or in life. When Harriet’s brother decides to strike out for the Genesee Valley in Western New York, Harriet decides to go with him—disguised as a boy. Their journey includes sickness, uninvited strangers, and difficult emotional terrain as Harriet sees more of the world, realizes what she wants, and accepts who she’s loved all along.

Contains monthly column of the Sequoya League.

Tad and his aunt Hattie take an imaginary trip to Hong Kong. Armed with a globe, an illustrated almanac, and their imaginations, Tad and Aunt Hattie play the travel game. They ride elephants in India, escape deadly piranhas in the Amazon River, and hail a water taxi to visit the beautiful boat city of Hong Kong--all without leaving the apartment above the family tailor shop in Buffalo, New York. This funny, affectionate story is based on author John Grandits’s own childhood experiences. The charming and highly detailed illustrations will keep children entranced through multiple readings and encourage them to play their own version of the travel game.

In TV Snapshots, Lynn Spigel explores snapshots of people posing in front of their television sets in the 1950s through the early 1970s. Like today’s selfies, TV snapshots were a popular photographic practice through which people visualized their lives in an increasingly mediated culture. Drawing on her collection of over 5,000 TV snapshots, Spigel shows that people did not just watch TV: women used the TV set as a backdrop for fashion and glamour poses; people dressed in drag in front of the screen; and in pinup poses, people even turned the TV setting into a space for erotic display. While the television industry promoted on-screen images of white nuclear families in suburban homes, the snapshots depict a broad range of people across racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds that do not always conform to the reigning middle-class nuclear family ideal. Showing how the television set became a central presence in the home that exceeded its mass entertainment function, Spigel highlights how TV snapshots complicate understandings of the significance of television in everyday life.