How do you cheer up a woman who has spent hours cleaning prison toilets with a broken mop? The secret is in a tres leches cake. In Iran’s prisons, women endure horrors: they are beaten, interrogated, and humiliated in a thousand ways. Even a whisper to a fellow inmate can be punished. Yet—in spite of anything and everything—they resist: they bake. They console each other, cry together, dance together. The Evin Prison Bakers’ Club is a call to stand up for Woman, Life, Freedom by a woman still fighting for a free Iran.

In the six lectures of Great Heroes and Heroines of Hawaiian Heritage, you will meet some of the key figures of Hawaiian history from the 19th and 20th centuries, a tumultuous period in Hawaii’s transformation from a secluded group of independent islands to the 50th US state and a bustling tourist destination. With Leilani Basham of the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa as your guide, you’ll be introduced to the political leaders, scholars, activists, and artists who have been integral to Hawaii’s story and the preservation of Hawaiian culture.

Written in Cho Nam-joo’s signature razor-sharp prose, Miss Kim Knows follows eight women as they confront how gender shapes and orders their lives. A woman is born. A woman is filmed in public without consent. A woman is gaslit. A woman is discriminated against at work. A woman grows old. A woman becomes famous. A woman is hated, and loved, and then hated again. As with Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, these microcosmic stories prove eerily relatable under Cho Nam-joo’s precise, unveiled gaze, offering another captivating read from an essential voice in fiction.

In 1897, as a White oligarchy made plans to allow the United States to annex Hawai'i, native Hawaiians organized a massive petition drive to protest. Ninety-five percent of the native population signed the petition, causing the annexation treaty to fail in the US Senate. This event was unknown to many contemporary Hawaiians until Noenoe K. Silva rediscovered the petition in the process of researching this book. With few exceptions, histories of Hawai'i have been based exclusively on English-language sources.

In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances—a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia. Nezhukmatathil restores our astonishment and wonder about food through her encounters with a range of foods and food traditions. From shave ice to lumpia, mangoes to pecans, rambutan to vanilla, she investigates how food marks our experiences and identities and explores the boundaries between heritage and memory.

Award-winning Japanese author and poet Mieko Kawakami brings Ashes of Spring, a collection of short stories set in everyday life in Japan just before the pandemic lockdown.

Hi'i is proud to be a Naupaka, a family renowned for its contributions to hula and her hometown of Hilo, Hawaii, but there’s a lot she doesn’t understand. She’s never met her legendary grandmother and her mother has never revealed the identity of her father. Worse, unspoken divides within her tight-knit community have started to grow, creating fractures whose origins are somehow entangled with her own family history.

“You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza’s crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.

In this unusually personal document, Queen Liliʻuokalani paints a detailed picture of life in a royal family—something few such figures ever attempt. She shares important memories from her childhood and chronicles her life on the international stage, beginning with her momentous ascension to the throne and ending with her effective overthrow by American businessmen and politicians who had little interest in maintaining Hawaii’s autonomy.

So Many Stars knits together the voices of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and two-spirit elders of color as they share authentic, intimate accounts of how they created space for themselves and their communities in the world. This singular project collects the testimonies of twenty elders, each a glimmering thread in a luminous tapestry, preserving their words for future generations—who can more fully exist in the world today because of these very trailblazers.

This book weaves together stories of the many dogs Elias has been lucky enough to know, both in his personal life and while doing his Dogist work. Told in a light tone that does not shy away from more serious issues (Elias is not above the occasional sentimental moment or dog pun), this book charmingly explores the ways that dogs are not just our family and our friends but also irreplaceable beings capable of generating boundless love and restoring balance to our lives.

In the aftermath of World War II, Goh Junja is a girl just coming into her own. She is the latest successful deep-sea diver in her family. She urges her mother to allow her to make their annual trip to Mt. Halla, where they trade sea delicacies for pork. A sea-village girl, Junja has never been to the mountains, where it smells like mushrooms and earth, and it is there she falls in love with mountain-boy Yang Suwol. But when Junja returns one day later, it is just in time to see her mother take her last breath, beaten by the waves during a dive she was taking in Junja's place.

When Milan Patel visits his parents at their family-run motel in Montana, he's expecting the usual drama. But shortly after he arrives, his father mysteriously dies in the motel pool. Now everyone's a suspect. What was meant to be a quick trip becomes Milan's worst nightmare, as he races to solve his father's murder while confronting the past he tried to leave behind.

Screenwriter Harada is disconnected from the world. Lonely and jaded, he’s drifted apart from his son and is dismissive when approached with gestures of friendship, including from a lonely and mysterious tenant who lives in his mostly empty apartment building. One night, when Harada returns to the dilapidated downtown district of Tokyo where he grew up, he meets a man who looks exactly like his long-dead father. And so begins Harada’s ordeal, thrust into a reality where his parents appear to be alive at the exact age they had been when they died many years earlier.

Abe Jacobs is Kanien’kehá:ka from Ahkwesáhsne—or, as white people say, a Mohawk Indian from the Saint Regis Tribe. At eighteen, Abe left the reservation where he was raised and never looked back. Now forty-three, Abe is suffering from a rare disease—one his doctors in Miami believe will kill him.