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Books by WSU faculty
Fiction
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Chinese Opera
By Alex Kuo, professor , English
From the publisher: Sonny Ling and Sissy George are in Beijing. He's a hotshot pianist teaching at the Central Conservatory of Music. She's a gutsy nightclub singer. It's the political spring of 1989 but behind the walls of the Conservatory Madame Zhou rules. While their friends struggle to keep their humanity, Sonny and Sissy give the performances of their lives in a Chinese drama played out to the accompaniment of Bizet's Carmen.
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Disturbance-Loving Species
by Peter Chilson, Associate Professor, English
From the publisher: In the tradition of Paul Theroux, Peter Chilson's fiction debut delivers a fascinating, heart-wrenching view of modern African culture, filtered through the lens of the West. The collection explores the experiences of Americans struggling to cope with life in Africa, and of Africans acclimating to life in the United States. In a novella and four short stories, Chilson uses a phrase borrowed from biology to point out how our "disturbance-loving species" thrives in the most chaotic, seemingly uninhabitable situations.
In the opening novella, an idealistic young college graduate teaching
in Niger witnesses his colleague's abduction by soldiers at gunpoint.
"American Food," winner of the Gulf Coast Prize for fiction, finds a West African professor trying to preserve his culinary customs while living in a small Oregon town. Chilson, who went to Africa first as a Peace Corps volunteer and later as a freelance journalist, captures in vivid detail the strange, exhilarating frisson between cultures.
Read a review from WSM
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Lipstick and Other Stories
By Alex Kuo, professor , English
From the publisher: Lipstick and Other Stories has won an American Book Award for 2002, the first book by a Hong Kong author and the first book from a publisher outside the United States to be so honored. Alex Kuo bridges oceans, cultures and generations. From grade-schoolers terrorizing Beijing’s Bank of China to seeing Elton John at the Holiday Inn-Lido, from an imaginary interview with Chairman Mao’s trusted confidant and advisor to encountering a Christian evangelist at the Great Hall of the People; these stories play with and explode the intricate and often murky relationships between ideology, dissidence and just plain everyday survival.
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On Her Way: Stories and Poems about Growing Up Girl
Ed. by Sandy Asher. Contains "Where the Lilacs Grow" by Pamela Smith Hill, assistant professor, English
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Panda Diaries
By Alex Kuo
From the publisher: Panda Diaries is a novel about Colonel Ge's attempts to reclaim his personal life after a short, meteoric career in China's secret service. In charge of Beijing's political security, he was banished to an insignificant position in Changchun in northern China because in that microscopic moment after the generals had assumed command of Tiananmen Square, Ge refused to answer deceit with deceit. His companion is his mailman, a panda bear from the animal kingdom, and together they discover that war is not only waged between peoples, but against animals as well.
Read a review from WSM
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Quaker Testimony
By Irene Allen
This story is woven around the strong Quaker conviction that war must be resisted. The problem is that not all Quakers agree on what form war resistance must take. In that setting, a war tax protester has been brutally shot to death, and it is probable that the killer is among the faithful.
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The Last Grail Keeper
Pamela Smith Hill, Instructor, WSU Vancouver
Felicity Jones has a gift – an odd trick of knowing how things will turn out before they happen. But when she goes to England with her mother, who's researching a book on King Arthur, mysterious events unfold in a way that even Felicity couldn't have predicted. The Grail legend springs to life and she's drawn into its magic.
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We Should Never Meet
By Aimee Phan, assistant professor, English
Compelling, moving, and beautifully written, the interlinked stories that make up We Should Never Meet explore the reverberations of the Vietnam War in a completely new light. Intersecting the lives of eight characters across three decades and two continents, these stories dramatize the events of Operation Babylift, the U.S.-led evacuation of thousands of Vietnamese orphans to America just weeks before the fall of Saigon.
Four of the stories follow the saga of one orphan's journey from the points-of-view of a teenage mother, a duck farmer and a Catholic nun from the Mekong Delta, a social worker in Saigon, and a volunteer doctor from America. The other four take place 20 years later and chronicle the lives of four Vietnamese orphans now living in America.
We Should Never Meet marks the debut of a major new writer for our time.
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