Fences
Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk

No-No Boy

“No-No Boy has the honor of being among the first of what has become an entire literary canon of Asian American literature,” writes novelist Ruth Ozeki in her new foreword. First published in 1957, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment behind them. It was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of Japanese American writers and scholars recognized the novel’s importance and popularized it as one of literature’s most powerful testaments to the Asian American experience.

No-No Boy tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a fictional version of the real-life “no-no boys.” Yamada answered “no” twice in a compulsory government questionnaire as to whether he would serve in the armed forces and swear loyalty to the United States. Unwilling to pledge himself to the country that interned him and his family, Ichiro earns two years in prison and the hostility of his family and community when he returns home to Seattle. As Ozeki writes, Ichiro’s “obsessive, tormented” voice subverts Japanese postwar “model-minority” stereotypes, showing a fractured community and one man’s “threnody of guilt, rage, and blame as he tries to negotiate his reentry into a shattered world.”

The first edition of No-No Boy since 1979 presents this important work to new generations of readers.

More Adult Books

  • In Shishmaref, Alaska, new seawalls are constructed while residents navigate the many practical and bureaucratic obstacles to moving their entire island village to higher ground.

  • The whooping crane rustlers are girls. Young girls. Cowgirls, as a matter of fact, all “bursting with dimples and hormones”—and the FBI has never seen anything quite like them.

  • From legendary playwright August Wilson comes the powerful, stunning dramatic bestseller that won him critical acclaim, including the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize.

  • In Finding Margaret Fuller, the remarkable life of Margaret Fuller unfolds as she navigates the intellectual circles of 19th-century America, becoming a mentor to Louisa May Alcott and inspiring Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. As she breaks barriers—becoming the first woman allowed to study at Harvard and the first female foreign news correspondent—Fuller embarks on a journey filled with passion, revolution, and self-discovery, ultimately challenging the societal norms of her time.

    Read More about "Finding Margaret Fuller"...