Forget apple pie. Chop suey is America’s national food, or was until kung pao chicken took its place. Jennifer Lee’s study of transplanted Asian cooking is a wide-angle view of the way America absorbs its immigrants even as it embraces facets of their culture. She points out that that there…

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The five stories in Leah Hayes’ hard-to-categorize collection are all a sort of noir fairy tale, dark parables with strange, hazy lessons, fables with a touch of the horrific. Illustrated in scratchboard (you may remember this technique from your high school art class). Hayes’ black-and-white pages carry tales of duck…

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Using a 15-or-so-year-old Mexican-American kid who smiles every time he says something in French as the vehicle to address black-white race relations isn’t the only clever turn in Dagoberto Gilb’s latest novel The Flowers. There’s also a black albino named Pink who passes in an apartment building where the landlord…

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