To the right is an ongoing, multi-cultural reading list.  If you know of other books, short stories, poems, essays, etc. that multi-cultural literature students may be interested in, please feel free to share them with me so that I may share them with others on this website.

NOTE:  Countries listed may mean the author's country of origin, the culture about which the tale is spun, or both.

ADDITIONAL NOTE:  This page is under continual construction, meaning the list is updated as new titles are either released or introduced to me.

CANADA:

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Boston:  Houghton Miflin, 1986.

FROM AMAZON.COM, 8/28/06:

". . . respected Canadian poet and novelist Atwood presents here a fable of the near future. In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right Schlafly/Falwell-type ideals have been carried to extremes in the monotheocratic government. The resulting society is a feminist's nightmare: women are strictly controlled, unable to have jobs or money and assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the "morally fit" Wives. The tale is told by Offred (read: "of Fred"), a Handmaid who recalls the past and tells how the chilling society came to be. This powerful, memorable novel is highly recommended for most libraries. . ."

CHINA:

Ha Jin. Waiting: A Novel.  New York:  Pantheon, 1999.

FROM AMAZON.COM, 8/28/06:

"Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu." Like a fairy tale, Ha Jin's masterful novel of love and politics begins with a formula--and like a fairy tale, Waiting uses its slight, deceptively simple framework to encompass a wide range of truths about the human heart."

Da Chen. Colors of the Mountain.  New York:  Random House, 2000.

From AMAZON.COM, 08/16/07:

. . . Da Chen describes his youth in mainland China with engaging humor and affecting warmth. It's often a harrowing tale: born in 1962, Chen was the grandson of a landlord, which rendered his entire family pariahs during the Cultural Revolution. And though initially an excellent student, he was ostracized in school and told he could never attend college. He responded by making friends with a group of young thugs who drank, smoked, and gambled but were kind to him. After Mao died in 1976, the budding juvenile delinquent discovered that higher education might be available to him after all. Chen worked hard to make up for years of neglected studies, and his memoir closes with a jubilant scene as he and his brother Jin are both accepted into college; for his suffering family, "thirty years of humiliation had suddenly come to an end." Chen's lucid yet emotional prose unsparingly portrays a topsy-turvy society where unfairness reigns and the rules are arbitrarily changed without warning, but his zest for life and sharp eye for character make even the most awful moments grimly funny. This is no saga of victimization, but a thrilling account of an ordeal that fosters spiritual growth. Readers will cheer Chen's triumph over daunting odds. --Wendy Smith

GREAT BRITAIN:

McEwan, Ian.  Saturday.  New York:  Random House, 2005.

From AMAZON.COM, 08/16/07:

From Bookmarks Magazine
As McEwan writers, “When anything can happen, everything matters.” Saturday magnifies a pivotal moment in history and a day in a man’s life as secure foundations crack and uncertainty rushes in. While critics cited different overriding themes, Saturday explores ideas of fate and purpose, life’s fragility, revelation, and terror at all levels of society. McEwan, an enduring talent in Britain combines “literary seriousness” with a “momentum more commonly associated with genre fiction.” The result is an intricate, captivating novel defined by a “serene tension” that erupts into a dark reality despite its hero’s optimism (New York Times Book Review).

McEwan, Ian.  Black Dogs. New York:  Random House, 1999.

From AMAZON.COM, 01/14/08:

From Library Journal

Having lost his parents in an auto accident when he was eight years old, the narrator of McEwan's splendid new novel is fascinated with other people's parents--particularly his remarkable in-laws, indissolubly linked yet estranged and combative almost since their wedding. A man of reason who was once a Communist, Bernard Tremaine cannot understand why his wife, June, rejected political activism for spiritual quest after "an encounter with evil" in the form of two fierce black dogs. McEwan does not so much tell their story as the story of the son-in-law's efforts to understand them better by writing about them. Though Bernard and June represent diametrically opposed ways of looking at the world--two views beautifully and succinctly captured by McEwan--they are not mere vessels of thought but lively, distinctive characters in their own right. As the narrator returns to the French countryside where June fatefully encountered the dogs, the deceptively simple buildup makes her brush with violence all the more shocking. A novel of ideas with the hard edge of a thriller; highly recommended.

HAITI:

Danticat, Edwidge.  Breath, Eyes, Memory.  New York:  Vintage, 1995.

FROM AMAZON.COM, 9/5/06

"Some 200 years ago, Haiti acquired its independence. A first for any Black nation at the time. In the years following that momentous occasion , the country began
a gradual slide into political , economic , and social instability. The policies of other countries directly contributed to this collapse. "Breath, Eyes, Memory" begins at the height of that Haitian reality."

INDIA:

Roy, Arundhati.  The God of Small Things.  New York:  Harper/Perennial, 1998.

FROM AMAZON.COM, 8/28/06:

"The God of Small Things is nominally the story of young twins Rahel and Estha and the rest of their family, but the book feels like a million stories spinning out indefinitely; it is the product of a genius child-mind that takes everything in and transforms it in an alchemy of poetry. The God of Small Things is at once exotic and familiar to the Western reader, written in an English that's completely new and invigorated by the Asian Indian influences of culture and language."

Desai, Anita.  Clear Light of Day. New York:  Harper and Row, 1980.

FROM THE BACK COVER:

"Anita Desai has created an entire little civilzation here from a fistful of memories, from a patchwork of sickroom dreams and childhood games and fairy tales.  "Clear Light of Day" does what only the very best novels can do: it totally submerges us.  It takes us so deeply into another world that we almost fear we won't be able to climb out again."--Anne Tyler

"To the family living in the shabby, dusty house in Delhi, Tara's visit brings a sharp remeinder of life outside the traditional pattern. . ."

Desai, Kiran.  The Inheritance of Loss.  New York:  Grove Press, 2006.

Winner of the 2006 Mann Booker Award. 

FROM THE INSIDE COVER:
"A revelation of the possibilities of the novel. It is vast in scope, from the peaks of the Himalayas to the immigrant quarters of New York; the gripping stories of people buffeted by the winds of history, personal and political.  Desai's voice is fiercely funny--a humor born out of darkness, the laughter of the dispossessed.  It is a remarkable novel because it is rich in that most elusive quality in fiction:  wisdom."

Suri, Manil.  The Death of Vishnu.  New York:  W. W. Norton, 2001.

FROM THE BACK COVER:
"Vishnu, the odd-job man in a Bombay apartment block, lies dying on the staircase landing.  Around him the lives of the apatment dweller unfold:  the warring housewives on the first floor, lovesick teenagers on the second, and the widower, alone and quietly grieving, on the top floor of the building.  In a fevered state, Vishnu looks back on his love affair with the seductive Padmini and wonders if he might actually be the god Vishnu, guardian of the entire universe.

Blending incisive comedy with Hindu mythology and a dash of Bollywood sparkle, "The Death of Vishnu" is an intimate and compelling view of an unforgettable world."

JAPAN:

Golden, Arthur.  Memoirs of a Geisha:  A Novel.  New York:  Alfred A. Knopf,      1997.

FROM AMAZON.COM, 8/28/06:

From Library Journal
"I wasn't born and raised to be a Kyoto geisha....I'm a fisherman's daughter from a little town called Yoroido on the Sea of Japan." How nine-year-old Chiyo, sold with her sister into slavery by their father after their mother's death, becomes Sayuri, the beautiful geisha accomplished in the art of entertaining men, is the focus of this fascinating first novel. Narrating her life story from her elegant suite in the Waldorf Astoria, Sayuri tells of her traumatic arrival at the Nitta okiya (a geisha house), where she endures harsh treatment from Granny and Mother, the greedy owners, and from Hatsumomo, the sadistically cruel head geisha."

MIDDLE EAST:

Barks, Coleman.  The Essential Rumi.  New York, HarperCollins, 1995.

FROM THE INTRODUCTION:

"Persians and Afghanis call Rumi 'Jelaluddin Balkhi.'  He was born September 30, 1207, in Balkh, Afghanistan, which was then part of the Persian empire."  Upon the disappearance of his best friend, "Rumi began the transformation into a mystical artist. 'He turned into a poet, began to listen to music, and sang, whilrling around, hour after hour. . .'

"For the last tweolve years of his life, Rumi dictated . . . six volumes of his masterwork."

EXCERPT: 

Spring

Again, the violet bows to the lily.

Again, the rose is tearing off her gown!

The green ones have come from the other world,

tipsy like the breeze up to some new foolishness.

Again, near teh top of the mountain

the anemone's sweet features appear. 

The hyacinth speaks formally to the jasmine,

"Peace be with you." "And peach to you, lad!

Come walk with me in this meadow."

[. . .] Again, the season of Spring has come

and a spring-source rises under everything,

a moon sliding from the shadows. [. . .]

SOUTH AFRICA:

Coetzee, J.M.  In the Heart of the Country.  London:  Secker and Warburg, 1977.

FROM AMAZON.COM, 8/28/06:

"Stifled by the torpor of colonial South Africa, and trapped in a web of reciprocal oppression, a lonely sheep farmer seeks comfort in the arms of a black concubine. But when his embittered spinster daughter Magda feels shamed, this lurch across the racial divide marks the end of a tenuous feudal peace. As she dreams madly of bloody revenge, Magda's consciousnes sstarts to drift and the line between fact and the workings of her excited imagination becomes blurred. What follows is the fable of a woman's passionate, obsessed and violent response to an Africa that will not heed her. . ."

Coetzee, J.M.  Waiting for the Barbarians.  New York:  Penguin, 1982.

(A Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)

FROM AMAZON.COM, 8/28/06:

"Coetzee writes in a very unique manner. Aside from the colonel (Joll), no one has a name in the book, he just refers to everyone as "the girl" or "the magistrate". As soon as the colonel visits the city with an obsession about an impending barbarian invasion, the entire town becomes paranoid with these barbarians. The barbarians in fact are just simple nomads that live in the adjacent mountains, but the obsession grows so quickly that the magistrate, when he tries to reach out to barbarians and understand who they are, he gets misunderstood as a barbarian helper and so is put in jail. .  . highly impressed by Coetzee. He definitely deserved the Nobel Prize."

Lessing, Doris.  Memoirs of a Survivor.  New York:  Bantom Books, 1974.

FROM AMAZON.COM, 8/28/06:

"These "Memoirs" postulate a near future when society's framework and infrastructure are breaking down. Young people are forming gangs and moving out of the city, the trappings of civilization are no longer relevant, cannibalism is rumored. Priorities are back to food, shelter, and clothing. Personal safety and a bath cannot be taken for granted."

rev. 08/28/06