Hyphen magazine - Asian American arts, culture, and politics

When the Hyphen editorial team discovered that Amy Tan was the recipient of the third annual Litquake Barbary Coast Award for contribution to the Bay Area literary community, there was a flurry of confused emails: What exactly was this award and why did Amy Tan deserve to win it?

The economic downturn (dare I say, nascent depression) has hit the media sector especially hard, taking its toll on ethnic media -- as Harry recently posted about. But the publishing world -- facing similar competition from online media, the Kindle and declining readership -- is also facing some seriously hard times. Where does this leave the Asian American lit scene?

Hyphen's Family Issue (#17) release party definitely signified that summer was here with two rooms of music and performers galore at 111 Minna Gallery last Friday. Plus, it featured the debut of Hyphen's baby line -- including onesies and bibs -- which quickly became the fashion accessory of the night.

What do a wannabe Indian American surfer, a Taiwanese rock band, a Bhangra love affair, an escape from Vietnam and a suspected parental affair have in common? These were all subjects of finalist stories from the second annual Hyphen and Asian American Writers' Workshop Short Story contest. Come out to AAWW this Thursday May 28th at 7 pm and hear winning author Shivani Manghnani, along with finalists Bushra Rehman, Kevin Tang, Joy Wood and Ky-Phong Tran read. You can also pick up the Family Issue of Hyphen with Manghnani's winning story: "Playing the Sheik."

Sung Woo's debut book of interwoven short stories Everything Asian (Thomas Dunne Books) is set mostly in East Meets West, an Asian gift shop located in a strip mall in New Jersey during the 1980s, and concerns a Korean immigrant family trying to acculturate and get reacquainted with their father/husband -- who had already been in the US for five years. We asked Woo -- a former literature section contributor to Hyphen -- to subject himself to our set of literary questions.

The New York Observer has a scintillating story up about a young woman named Kari Ferrell, one of "Salt Lake City's Most Wanted." The story, amusingly titled "The Hipster Grifter," goes into the history of 22-year-old Ferrell's twisted path of lies, deceptions and check fraud -- which struck hipster strongholds like the Vice Magazine office and other parts

Thaddeus Rutkowski's novel Roughhouse (Kaya Press)
has been described as "in-your-face punk realism with touches
of the surreal and subversive black humor."
His second novel, Tetched, takes the experimental form of "fractals" --
or chapters composed of several paragraph-sized vignettes.
We asked the New York-based writer to subject himself to
our set of literary questions. [See Rutkowski read at Eastwind Books of  Berkeley, Saturday April 4th at 7 p.m.]

I'm at the Women, Action and the Media or WAM conference at MIT this weekend and wanted to try my hand at some live-blogging -- so far I have a few posts up at New America Media. There hasn't been a whole lot of Asian American representation so far, so I'm super excited about this ethnic media panel starring Carolyn Ji Jong Goossen (my co-worker at New America Media), along with Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan and Shruti Swamy from San Jose-based India Currents. [BTW, I'll be talking about Hyphen's super-indie model at a panel Sunday morning titled: "The Art of Low Budgets: How Indy Magazines Can Compete in a Mainstream World."]

I've been following the supposed demise of the mainstream publishing world pretty closely. What wannabe writer isn't? Is it the Kindle or Amazon or huge advances or just that no one reads anymore? Whatever it is, I'm trying to adapt my daydreams about my forthcoming beautifully-designed hardback book and world tour to perhaps a new reality ... one that involves selling electronic chapbooks out of the trunk of my electric car.

But in the meantime, the success of two Bay Area-based Asian American writers -- Minal Hajratwala and Yiyun Li -- has been buoying my dismal thoughts with the release of their latest books. 

Okay, whatever my particular opinion on the Slumdog phenom, I think it's clear that it is a stellar year for South Asian film and I am excited to blog about the impressive selection of South Asian films at the San Francisco International Film Festival. (Finally!) If nothing else, there's always the Saturday night Bollywood movie at the Castro: Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi.