"Dirk Struan rose from humble beginnings to build Struan & Company, also known as the Noble House, into the world’s largest Far East trading company. He is now the Tai-Pan—Supreme Leader—of all Tai-Pans in China. Along the way, however, he made a powerful enemy. Tyler Brock, Struan’s rival from their early opium-smuggling days, also heads a large trading fleet, second in size only to Struan’s. But it is not only silks and spices that drive...

The House Without a Key (1925) is a mystery novel by Earl Derr Biggers. The first in a series of novels featuring Chinese American detective Charlie Chan, The House Without a Key is notable for its nuanced depiction of race and class on the edges of American empire. Based in part on the life of Chinese Hawaiian detective Chang Apana, the character of Charlie Chan was intended by Biggers as an alternative to racist Yellow Peril stereotypes of the early...

"Japanese POW camp Changi, Singapore: hell on earth for the soldiers contained within its barbed wire walls. Officers and enlisted men, all prisoners together--yet the old hierarchies and rivalries survive. An American corporal, known as the King, has used his personality and wiles to facilitate trading with guards and locals to get needed food, supplies, [and] even information into the camp. The imprisoned upper-class officers have never had to do...

"Life is full of great expectations for Korean American Pippa Park. It seems like everyone, from her family to the other kids at school, has a plan for how her life should look. So when Pippa gets a mysterious basketball scholarship to Lakeview Private, she jumps at the chance to reinvent herself by following the "Rules of Cool." At Lakeview, Pippa juggles old and new friends, an unrequited crush, and the pressure to perform academically and athletically...

In the tenth century, Japan was both physically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world. The Pillow Book recaptures this lost world with the diary of a young court lady. Sei Shōnagon was a contemporary of Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the well-known novel The Tale of Genji. Unlike the latter's fictionalized view of the Heian-era court, Shōnagon's journal provides a lively miscellany of anecdotes, observations, and gossip, intended to be...