Book Description: A thrilling new story collection from acclaimed writer Don Lee exploring Asian American identity, spanning decades and continents

Twenty-one years after the publication of his landmark debut collection Yellow, Don Lee returns to the short story form for his sixth book, The Partition.

The Partition is an updated exploration of Asian American identity, this time with characters who are presumptive model minorities in the arts, academia, and media. Spanning decades, these nine novelistic stories traverse an array of cities, from Tokyo to Boston, Honolulu to El Paso, touching upon transient encounters in local bars, restaurants, and hotels. 

Culminating in a three-story cycle about a Hollywood actor, The Partition incisively examines heartbreak, identity, family, and relationships, the characters searching for answers to universal questions: Where do I belong? How can I find love? What defines an authentic self?

Book Description: In novel form, a contemporary alt-country ballad of heartbreak, failure, love, and unquenchable yearning

Drawn to the music of indie singer-songwriters like Will Johnson, who helped shape the lyrics in this book, Don Lee has written a novel that unforgettably captures America’s yearnings.

Yadin Park is a talented alt-country musician whose career floundered—first doomed by his homely looks and lack of stage presence, then by a progressive hearing disorder. His girlfriend, Jeanette Matsuda, might have been a professional photographer, but for a devastating heartbreak in her teens. Now Yadin works for Jeanette’s father’s carpet-laying company in California, while Jeanette cleans rooms at a local resort.

When Yadin’s former lover and musical partner, the celebrated Mallory Wicks, comes back into his life, all their most private hopes and dreams are exposed, their secret fantasies about love and success put to the test. Beautifully sad and laced with dark humor, Lonesome Lies Before Us is a profound, heartfelt romance, a soulful and memorable song.

Book Description: Winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature from the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association.

Hilarity, heartbreak, observations of human nature as clear and sharp as his prose style—these have long been hallmarks of the critically acclaimed fiction of Don Lee. But never before has he been as funny, or as tragic, or as revealing as in The Collective.

Joshua Yoon seems larger than life to his classmates at Macalester College, especially to those who will become his closest friends, narrator Eric Cho and the gorgeous Jessica Tsai. Bawdy, brainy, generous, and manipulative, he rallies them to stand up for themselves as Asian Americans, as nonconformists, as artists meant to break all the rules in the pursuit of truth and perfection. Little do they know the effect he will have on the rest of their lives.

Years later, the three friends reunite in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Joshua once again binds them together by forming a group called the 3AC, the Asian American Artists Collective. As the collective grows, work and love affairs war with ambition, yet the core members of the 3AC manage to sustain their idealism. That is, until Joshua—ever the provocateur—cannot resist manipulating a series of events that will blow their friendships apart, and ultimately devastate even the lives of strangers.

Featuring a central character as enigmatic and absorbing as Jay Gatsby, The Collective is a landmark achievement—a dazzling exploration of racial identity and the queasy position of the artist in contemporary America. Brilliant and full of humanity, it is a modern classic in the making.

Book Description: Lyndon Song is a renowned sculptor who fled New York City to become a Brussels sprouts farmer in the small California town of Rosarita Bay. Lyndon has a brother, Woody, an indicted financier turned movie producer, and Woody has a plan, involving a golf-course resort on Lyndon’s land and an aging kung-fu diva from Hong Kong with a mean kick and a meaner drinking problem.

Over one madcap Labor Day weekend, this plan wreaks havoc on Lyndon’s bucolic and carefully managed life. Woody’s financial (and existential) crisis embroils everyone from a developer obsessed with college football to two field biologists studying western snowy plovers, and culminates in literature’s first-ever windsurfing chase scene. Meanwhile, Lyndon’s great love, Sheila Lemke, the impulsive mayor of Rosarita Bay, is having a crisis of her own, leading her to petty vandalism; other women smell mysteriously of chocolate ice cream; Buddhist missives arrive scrawled on paper airplanes; and a small plot of exceptionally lush marijuana is ready for harvest. In all, Lyndon’s life in Rosarita Bay is ready to come apart at the seams.

Hilarious and philosophical, this many-hued novel about the landscape of contemporary “multicultural” America is critically acclaimed Don Lee’s best book yet.

Book Description: Lisa Countryman vanishes in Tokyo in 1980, but no one seems to be in a particular hurry to find her. The Amerasian embassy official assigned to her case, Tom Hurley, can’t be bothered, entangled as he is in an unsavory love affair with the wife of a CIA officer. The neurotic Japanese cop in charge of the investigation, Kenzo Ota, is equally preoccupied—ridiculed by his peers, demeaned by his superiors, his life a lonely shambles. Worse, it appears Lisa disappeared into the shadow-world of Tokyo’s sex trade, where a bewildering and often comical variety of clubs cater to every imaginable male fantasy.

The mystery of her disappearance is intertwined with the mystery of her origins as an ainoko, or half-breed. For Lisa, who is half African American and half Asian, alienation and belonging, love and hate, are bound up with race. All the characters’ loyalties are divided—between their countries of origin and their adoptive nationalities, between their society’s traditions and their own sense of justice—as they yearn to find where they truly belong.

Written with understated elegance and peppered with humor, Country of Origin is a literary exploration of the meaning of identity and belonging that unfolds with a pace and daring worthy of its dramatic setting.

Book Description: Set in the fictional California town of Rosarita Bay, Don Lee's Yellow is a fresh, contemporary vision of what it means to be Asian in America, a post-immigrant examination of identity, race, and love. In this sophisticated and provocative collection, Korean, Japanese, and Chinese Americans flirt across and within racial lines, and end up facing not only fears of being ethnically "yellow" but also the universal terrors of failure and abandonment.

In a wide range of moods from the hilarious to the poignant to the sublime, these stories are smart and sexy, wry and evocative. Novelistic in scope, they feature such memorable characters as Annie Yung, whose aching heart and passion for country music have her longing for a cowboy; Duncan Roh, a big-wave surfer trying to transcend his reputation as a womanizer; Patrick and Brian Fenny, two mixed-blooded boys deserted by their golfer dad; ex-fisherman Alan Fujitani, marooned in romantic widowerhood; and the wildly competitive "Oriental Hair Poets," Marcella Ahn and Caroline Yip, engaged in a battle of wits for the attention of Dean Kaneshiro, whose handcrafted chairs are museum pieces. The title novella, which was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, spans twenty years, following Danny Kim from his disastrous foray into boxing as a teenager to his ascent into Boston society as a management consultant—poisoned not so much by racism as by his paranoid fear of it.

A literary descendant of Dubliners and Winesburg, Ohio, Yellow captures modern Asian American lives with moral urgency, surprising compassion, and sly humor.