Larissa Lai

"... a sci-fi, fantasy, critical social commentary, poetry, and product of the postmodern. Calling this an 'Asian book' or a 'woman's book' limits its scope and depth, a book that delves into memory, both personal and historical. It is also a creative challenge to conventional discussions on immigration and geographic/cultural displacement by exposing the power dynamics in the process. At the same time, however, the circular setup of the novel, the watery motifs, and gendered violence situates the book within women's experiences. Salt fish girl is also laden with loss, denial, forgetting and abandonment that is a common thread in an asian diasporic experience. Larissa Lai's poetic and lucid writing style fits so well with the fantastical yet tactile tone of the book. It is dream-like and yet feels intensely real. A delightful find. ... story about two Asian women -one a shapeshifter and the other obsessed with scent and her dead mother - who lived in very different times, but are somehow related ... And as a former Vancouverite, I also appreciated the book's run-down Pacific edge of the future setting."--Amazon.com reviews.

Salt Fish Girl

A stunning novel about a community of parthenogenic women under siege after the end of the world.

The Tiger Flu

When Fox Is a Thousand is a retelling of an old Chinese folktale. In Larissa Lai's novel, a fox spirit comes to haunt Artemis Wong, a young woman living in contemporary Vancouver. The Fox brings with her the history of another haunting, that of the Tang Dynasty poet Yu Hsuan-Chi, who was accused of having murdered the young maid servant who once worked for her. Part history, part fairytale, part urban discontent, this novel cracks open all preconceptions about Asian women, gender, sexuality, family, faith, and the flow of time.

When Fox is a Thousand

From Lambda Literary Award winner Larissa Lai: a long poem full of rage, love, and despair seeking justice, seeking roots, seeking a "po-ethics" by which to live.

Iron Goddess of Mercy

Automaton biographies

Told in three voices, When Fox Is a Thousand blends murder, intrigue, and more than a morsel of food for thought.

Automaton Biographies is the first full-length solo poetry book by novelist Larissa Lai (When Fox is a Thousand, Salt Fish Girl). With an ear to the white noise of advertising, pop music, CNN, biotechnology, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, cereal packaging, MuchMusic, Sanrio, critical theory, science fiction, antiracist organizing, rivers and streams, the internet, and Hollywood, Lai explores the problem of what it means to exist on the boundaries of the human. --Arsenal Pulp Press.

Automaton Biographies

Bhanu Kapil

Jihyun Yun

Franny Choi

Hala Alyan

Victoria Chang

Monica Sok

Devi Laskar

Karen An-hwei Lee

Sun Yung Shin

Marilyn Chin

Ryka Aoki

Diana Khoi Nguyen

Jane Wong

Nancy Chen Long

Eileen Tabios

Carlina Duan

Michelle Lee

Doyali Islam

Jessica Abughattas

Dena Igusti

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Paul Tran

Cynthia Dewi Oka

Mary-Kim Arnold

Mia Ayumi Malhotra

Maw Shein Win

Do Nguyen Mai

Shazia Hafiz Ramji

Su Cho

Jenna Le

Su Fang Ng

Isabella Wang

Amy Lam

Angie Sijun Lou

Nellie Wong

Torsa Ghosal

Kailee Pedersen

Manahil Bandukwala

Allison Albino

Sarah Audsley

Hajjar Baban

Maria Isabelle Carlos

Catherine Chen

Jennifer Cheng

Debra Kang Dean

Anuja Ghimire

Kate Hao

Mai-Linh Hong

C. X. Hua

Resi Ibanez

Ann Inoshita

Maya Khosla

Maddie Kim

Juliet Kono

Hyejung Kook

Iria Law

Mari L 'Esperance

Pacyinz Lyfoung

Meher Manda

Aurora Masum-Javed

Lani Montreal

Amy Patel

Yamini Pathak

Michelle Penaloza

Angela Penaredondo

Megan Pinto

Preeti Kaur Rajpal

Swati Rana

Karen Rigby

Raena Shirali

C. E. Shue

Kristen Sze-Tu

Lehua Taitano

Alaisha Verdeflor

Kara Kai Wang

Annette Wong

Shelly Wong

Jessica Yuan

They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets is a collection of hundreds of contemporary poems by both established and emerging Asian American Women Poets.

An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets

They Rise Like a Wave

Smaro Kamboureli

Essential reading for those interested in questions of justice and cultural representation, Land/Relations speaks to and moves beyond the critical junctures in the study of Canadian literatures today. In the aftermath of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and following Canada’s sesquicentennial, Land/Relations presents a collaborative effort at what Smaro Kamboureli and Larissa Lai call “counter-memory,” a collective effort to recognise “relationships that have always been”—between peoples, between humanity and other living forms, between us and the land—in an effort to avoid erasure, loss, and trauma. Twenty influential literary critics engage a variety of genres—essay, life writing, testament, polemic, poetry—to explore the ways Canadian cultural production has been shaped by social and historical relations and can be given new and various forms to decolonize the institutions associated with the creation of this country’s vision of Canadian literature.

Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures

Land/Relations

The latest novel by Larissa Lai (The Tiger Flu): an epic yet intimate story set during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during World War II.

The Lost Century

In this visionary novel by Larissa Lai—her first in sixteen years—a community of parthenogenic women, sent into exile by the male-dominated Salt Water City, goes to war against disease, technology, and powerful men that threaten them with extinction. Kirilow is a doctor apprentice whose lover Peristrophe is a “starfish,” a woman who can regenerate her own limbs and organs, which she uses to help her clone sisters whose organs are failing. When a denizen from Salt Water City suffering from a mysterious flu comes into their midst, Peristrophe becomes infected and dies, prompting Kirilow to travel to Salt Water City, where the flu is now a pandemic, to find a new starfish who will help save her sisters. There, Kirilow meets Kora, a girl-woman desperate to save her family from the epidemic. Kora has everything Kirilow is looking for, except the will to abandon her own family. But before Kirilow can convince her, both are kidnapped by a group of powerful men to serve as test subjects for a new technology that can cure the mind of the body. Bold, beautiful, and wildly imaginative, The Tiger Flu is at once a female hero’s saga, a cyberpunk thriller, and a convention-breaking cautionary tale—a striking metaphor for our complicated times.

The 1980s and 1990s are a historically crucial period in the development of Asian Canadian literature. Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s contextualizes and reanimates the urgency of that period, illustrates its historical specificities, and shows how the concerns of that moment—from cultural appropriation to race essentialism to shifting models of the state—continue to resonate for contemporary discussions of race and literature in Canada. Larissa Lai takes up the term “Asian Canadian” as a term of emergence, in the sense that it is constantly produced differently, and always in relation to other terms—often “whiteness” but also Indigeneity, queerness, feminism, African Canadian, and Asian American. In the 1980s and 1990s, “Asian Canadian” erupted in conjunction with the post-structural recognition of the instability of the subject. But paradoxically it also came into being through activist work, and so depended on an imagined stability that never fully materialized. Slanting I, Imagining We interrogates this fraught tension and the relational nature of the term through a range of texts and events, including the Gold Mountain Blues scandal, the conference Writing Thru Race, and the self-writings of Evelyn Lau and Wayson Choy.

Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s

Slanting I, Imagining We

Rita Wong

Poetry. SYBIL UNREST is a collaborative long poem begun in Hong Kong at the moment of the SARS outbreak in 2003, and the American invasions of Iraq. It was written as a punning conversation via email over the course of several years. With an ear to the noise of CNN, the BBC World Service, the US State Department, advertising and JackFM, Lai and Wong re-figure the sights, sounds and texts of contemporary culture seeking hope and connection while tripping over the barbed wire of banality. Sometimes bravely and sometimes stupidly, though always with a sense of humor, they hurl themselves through the crosshairs of war and capital, trying to recover the recoverable and reinvent the rest.

Sybil Unrest

Originally published by LINEBooks in 2008, sybil unrest by Larissa Lai and Rita Wong draws out the interconnections between feminism, environmentalism, and personal–political responsibility, highlighting and questioning notions of "human" and "female" evident in contemporary North American culture. It does so by referencing "Popular cultural icons, political figures, business slogans, transnational corporations, and other presences in our media–saturated world [which] populate the lines," in the words of a reviewer from Asian–Am–Lit–Fans online journal . Yet sybil unrest is more than a glorious odyssey through contemporary culture. Reviewer Sophie Mayer, writing on her blog on Chroma, compares sybil unrest to works by Anne Carson and Mary Shelley. And Lauren Fournier, writing in the Fall 2011 issue of West Coast Line, draws attention to the way sybil unrest unlike the traditional avant-garde poetics, focused only on the cultural and aesthetic, expands outward into the cultural and political social worlds. This book marks its space in 21st century poetics in indelible ink. The focus away from an "I" and onto an interactive and malleable subjective takes this foray into the avant-garde and makes it into "a critique of 'human' as a species," as Sonnet L'Abbe remarks in the Autumn 2011 issue of Canadian Literature. sybil unrest is clever, filled with delirious wordplay, deprecation and a subtle humour that will catch you unawares and make you laugh out loud.

sybil unrest

“Part exoskeletal enjambment, part shared soft biology, Automaton Biographies wends through creative industries and uncommon commons, picking up the shards of both our latent futures and our Polaroid pasts.”—Mark Nowak, poet The first poetry book by novelist Larissa Lai (When Fox is a Thousand) is a multilayered “autobiography” that puts an ear to the white noise of advertising, pop music, CNN, and biotechnology, exploring the problem of what it means to exist on the boundaries of “human.” Lai, who teaches English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, is prominent within the women’s, LGBT, and Asian American communities.

Larissa Lai

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