Dani Tsai grew up with Parker Tran. He was the quintessential boy next door: charming, popular, and destined to be a football star. Their childhood in middle-of-nowhere Silverpine, Oregon made them inseparable, and it was meant to stay that way—until they left for college and their friendship came to an unexpected end.

In the seven years since, Dani moved on to pursue a writing career in New York City, where she’s determined to keep her distance from the boy she once called her best friend, even if it means staying away from her hometown.

Years later, a chance encounter brings her face-to-face with Parker again, who is now a hotshot sports marketing director on a temporary assignment in New York. He’s traded his jersey and cleats for designer suits and an Aston Martin, and even more puzzling is that he seems to think they can be friends again. Try as she might, Dani can’t resist his pull. Sparks fly, and an impulsive kiss leads to heated nights in his hotel suite. They make a tentative agreement: Until Parker leaves New York, they’ll keep things casual—just sex, no strings attached.

Before long, the lines between lust and something deeper start to blur. As walls begin to crumble, Dani and Parker find themselves far too close for casual.

SPIT is the raw and electrifying memoir of Jonnie Park—better known by his rap moniker, Dumbfoundead—whose rise from an unruly childhood in Los Angeles’s iconic  Koreatown kid to international rap star is as unlikely as it is exhilarating.

Born in Argentina to Korean parents and smuggled by a coyote across the US-Mexico border at age three, Park grew up in L.A. amid cultural dislocation, his father’s violent alcoholism, and the turbulent protests and riots of the early 1990s. 

Searching for belonging, he found salvation in the highly competitive underground world of battle rap, where he was among the only successful Asian American battle rappers. He developed his freestyle superpowers amid a motley crew of characters at Project Blowed, the legendary South Central L.A. open-mic venue, many of whom went on to big careers in the music industry.

Told through the lens of his life’s greatest battles—his father’s rage, racist stereotypes, the pressures of fame, his own addiction—Park tells his story with his trademark humor, lyrical style, and unflinching honesty.

Like Eminem’s 8 Mile, SPIT charts the author’s course from dropout to cultural pioneer, one verse at a time. Featuring vivid graphic novel–style illustrations at the end of each chapter, SPIT gives visual life to the inner demons and outer adversaries Park faced along the way. From open-mics in South Central to music festivals across the globe, Park’s memoir is a testament to creativity, grit, and the power of speaking your truth—even when your voice isn’t what the world expects to hear.

More than just a chronicle of an artist’s path to success, SPIT is a groundbreaking story of identity, resilience, and reinvention. It is also the story of an Asian American outsider who turned life’s challenges into his stage, and battled his way to triumph.

“Choi's true-crime biography adds much-needed detail and perspective to Noguchi's unusual and compelling story.”
—Booklist

L.A. Coroner is a gripping true crime biography of Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the controversial “Coroner to the Stars,” who performed the autopsies of Marilyn Monroe, Robert F. Kennedy, Natalie Wood, and hundreds of other notable personalities. Choi, an award-winning historian and professor, deftly blends Los Angeles history, death investigation and forensic science, and Asian American history in a feat of exquisite storytelling.

L.A. Coroner is the first-ever biography of Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Chief Medical Examiner–Coroner of Los Angeles County from 1967 to 1982. Throughout his illustrious career, Dr. Noguchi conducted the official autopsies of some of the most high-profile figures of his time. His elaborate press conferences, which often generated more controversy than they did answers, catapulted him into the public eye.

Noguchi was also the inspiration for the popular 1970s–80s television drama Quincy, M.E., starring Jack Klugman. Featuring never-before-published details about Noguchi’s most controversial cases, L.A. Coroner is a meticulously researched biography of a complex man, set against the backdrop of the social and racial politics of the 1960s and 1970s and Hollywood celebrity culture.

February 24, 2020, started out like any other dayfor journalist and television anchor Dion Lim of San Francisco’s ABC7 News. Planning her pitches for the morning’s editorial meeting, she checked her Instagram account and saw a message from someone she didn’t recognize. Attached was a horrifying video in which men were beating and yelling racist slurs at an elderly Asian man who had been collecting cans in the Bayview neighborhood of San Francisco. Lim felt compelled to inves-tigate the story, help the man who “looked freakishly like my dad,” and bring the perpetrators to justice.Thus began Lim’s three-years-and-counting quest to bring at-tention to the appalling rise of anti-Asian hate and violence in America. Amplify! My Fight for Asian America brings readers on an eye-opening journey alongside Lim, who has unwittingly be-come a national hero for her relentless fight for Asian American visibility. Through deeply personal anecdotes about her own life as a Chinese American, exclusive interviews with survivors, ac-tivists, and historians, and incisive historical context, she pro-vides the very first book to tackle one of the biggest political and social controversies of this century from the perspective of the AAPI community. Amplify! offers a meaningful look at the real stories behind the headlines, providing Asian Americans and al-lies of all backgrounds a vital resource to broaden their perspec-tive and contribute to positive social transformation.

Winner of the Asian American Writers' Workshop Pages in Progress Prize

"A delightful and perceptive jaunt into the heart of the Indian American community of New Jersey, Edison is a charming, often hilarious novel brimming over with life, laughter, and dreams worthy of the most outrageous Bollywood movies.”
—Chitra Divakaruni, author of Independence and Mistress of Spices

"A sparkling epic worthy of Bollywood's silver screens."
—Kirkus Reviews

Edison is a Bollywood-style epic tale brimming with song and dance, action and comedy, love and pathos, and cameos by dozens of real Indian stars of yesterday and today—a hilariously entertaining masala film in the guise of literary fiction. 

Along the way, we glean bits of Bollywood history and fall in love with an improbable cast of characters that inhabits Edison’s “Little India.” Edison is a wild, romantic, laugh-out-loud love letter to the Indian American community of Edison, New Jersey, where author Pallavi Dixit grew up.

The unlikely star of Edison is Prem Kumar, the hapless youngest son of a titan of New Delhi industry. Obsessed with Hindi movies—what the world calls Bollywood—he is uninterested in joining the family business or marrying the spear-wielding heiress chosen by his father. He runs away to chase his filmmaking dreams in America, but his plans are immediately derailed. Instead, he finds himself crashing on a mattress and working at an Exxon gas station in the Indian immigrant community of Edison, New Jersey.

Although life is not going according to script, Prem finds a happy rhythm in this bewildering setting. When the beautiful and ambitious Leena Engineer bursts onto the scene, she and her grocery store–owning father upend Prem’s short-term plan to do as little as possible, launching him on an epic adventure to make something of himself. Supported by an unruly cast of roommates, aunties, murderous yet orderly mobsters, and film stars at once glamorous and ludicrous, Prem test-drives the role of hero, and along the way, he witnesses around him the transformation of an ordinary suburb into a bustling "Little India."