FALL 2025 CATALOG
Hello!
Founded in 1994, Kaya is an independent not-for-profit press made up of a group of dedicated writers, artists, readers, and lovers of books working together to publish the most challenging, thoughtful, and provocative literature being produced throughout the Asian and Pacific Island diasporas. We believe that people’s lives can be changed by literature that pushes us past expectations and out of our comfort zone. We believe that it’s impossible to generate power without first finding one’s center, and that our API diasporic focus is a starting point, not an ending point. We strive to bring to light works that have been unfairly overlooked or forgotten, whether because they were ahead of their times or because no one
The Fall 2025 Catalog Issue was crafted with the spirit of collage in mind, drawing inspiration from the book covers themselves. Since this catalog features all fictional titles, we embraced playful colors and layered visuals to blend elements from each story’s cover and highlight the distinct features that makes each work unique. Through this patchwork-style, ephemeral design, we hope not only to catch your eye but also to inspire you to dive into these stories and explore the worlds within.
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Board of Directors
Juliana S. Koo, President
Sunyoung Lee, Treasurer
Chez Bryan Ong
Patricia Wakida
Swati Khurana
Editorial Board
Lisa Chen
Neelanjana Banerjee
Sunyoung Lee
Sesshu Foster
FALL 2025
Blue Dragon White Tiger
Trân Văn Dĩnh
KAYA PRESS
Not Yet Gods
Djuna
224pp
Paperback
ISBN 9781935717119
Fiction
Translation
$19.95
November 2025
In the aftermath of a nuclear explosion set off in North Korea, an ordinary South Korean high-school classroom becomes ground zero for the discovery of a radical new source of energy: children capable of conducting and amplifying the telepathic and telekinetic powers of those around them. Soon enough the race is on to exploit these newfound human “batteries” by hunting them down and harnessing their power for everything from electricity to space travel to facelifts. But the emotional stakes could not be higher. After all, what happens when the primary energy source being used to run the world is housed within the brains and bodies of teenagers, subject to hormonal shifts and eddies, family loyalties, and interpersonal conflicts?
A new translation of an exhilarating and wildly imaginative work by the mysterious Korean SF phenom Djuna. Interlinked stories of psychics, mutants, conspiracies, dystopia, and the apocalypse that serve as timely allegories of the ills and possibilities of runaway technology in the present and the future. This collection showcases the best and the most beguiling tales of the imagination that are coming out of
- Minsoo Kang, The Melancholy of the Untold Story
Genre bending storytelling
A collection of stories exploring power, disability, and illusion at the edge of history’s end.
KAYA PRESS
KAYA PRESS
The Beginning of the East
Max Yeh
262pp
Fiction
Paperback
ISBN 978-1-885030-84-9
November 2025
Beginning of the East is an audacious high-wire grappling with the world-making powers of the literary imagination as filtered through experiences of an American scholar of Chinese descent and his attempt to map out the impact of Columbus’ “aberrations, delusions, and fantasies” on the brutality and political posturing of the American present—and thus on himself. Having already uprooted himself and his family from California to Mexico City, the narrator is even more radically unmoored when an earthquake forces him into an acute awareness of the physicality of experience. He begins to consider how such details help to render visible the motivations behind the construction and reconstruction of both self and culture.
“For a fresh take on the myth and reality of present-day America, free of cant and pedantry, this book is invaluable. Its quality is clear: first class, untrammeled, an extraordinary work.”
—John Loftus, Toulouse-Lautrec
Interconnected stories traveling east to a mythic Cathay and west to the New World
Made available again for the first time in decades
I Guess All We Have Is Freedom
Genpei Akasegawa
240pp
Paperback
ISBN 9781885030726
Fiction
$19.95
October 2025
Gravestones hatch political critiques and tomatoes resist being eaten in the wildly surreal and funny stories of Genpei Akasagawa (1937-2014), a giant of the Japanese avant-garde.
There is a small but potent club of authors- Miranda July and Patti Smith are both members--who were renowned artists long before they became writers. Genpei Akasagawa was already a giant of the Japanese contemporary art world when he began writing these stories, which earned him Japan’s two most prestigious book awards.
In these stories, ostensibly quiet tales of a single dad in 1970s Tokyo, a doorknob practices radical politics, a peeled tomato smarts in pain, raw oysters tick like time bombs and gravestones provide a critique of capitalism.
“Like all good poetry and all good humor, Genpei Akasegawa’s brilliant short stories tear the world apart and build it anew.”
-- Julia Kornberg, Berlin Atomized
Blue Dragon White Tiger
Trân Văn Dĩnh
288pp
Paperback
ISBN 9781935717102
Featured Fiction
Ink & Blood
$19.95
The year is 1967. Tran Van Minh, a Massachusetts professor recruited by the CIA, is sent home to Vietnam in the midst of war. While teaching at Hue University, Minh becomes more sympathetic to the Viet Cong—and increasingly skeptical of America’s military involvement. Over the span of a decade and across three continents, Minh joins a communist sleeper cell, works underground at a Vietnam People’s Army/North Vietnam command post, and flies to Paris as a delegate of the National Liberation Front. As the country of his childhood changes before his eyes, he must find a way to live beyond its shores— and the past it holds.
“It was rare to find Vietnamese writers in the United States speaking about this war, or to hear any Vietnamese voices at all in mainstream America. [. . .] Literature plays an important role as a corrective to this ignorance. [. . .] Thinking back to Tran Van Dinh, I wonder if he was lonely as the only Vietnamese novelist in America of his time.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize- winning author of The Sympathizer
Reprinted for the first time in 40 years
First Vietnamese American novel written in English and published in the United States
