O Chonghui is an immensely accomplished author, having won both the Yi Sang and Tongin awards, Korea's most prestigious prizes for fiction. Translations of her works into Japanese, English, French, and other languages have earned her international acclaim, generating comparisons with Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Munro, and Virginia Woolf. O Chonghui crafts historically-rooted yet timeless tales imagining core human experiences from a female point of view. Together with Pak Wanso (Park Wan-suh), she formed a powerful challenge to the conservative literary establishment in Korea, becoming one of the most astute observers of its society and the place of tradition within it.

These nine stories range from O's first published work in 1968 to one of her last publications in 1994. Her early stories are compact, often chilling accounts of family dysfunction, reflecting the decline of traditional, agrarian economics and the rise of urban, industrial living. Later stories are more expansive, weaving eloquent, occasionally wistful reflections on lost love and tradition together with provocative explorations of sexuality and gender. O makes use of flashbacks, interior monologues, and stream-of-consciousness in her narratives, developing themes of abandonment and loneliness in a carefully cultivated, dispassionate tone. Her nameless narrators stand in for the average individual, struggling to cope with emotional rootlessness and a yearning for permanence in family and society. Arguably the first female Korean fiction writer to follow Virginia Woolf's dictum to do away with the egoless, self-sacrificing "angel in the house," O Chonghui is a crucial figure in the history of modern Korean literature, on par with Kim Sowol, Hwang Sunwon, and Yi T'aejun.

Thinner than Skin is a riveting novel about identity and belonging. It's also a love story: between Nadir, a Pakistani man trying to make his way as a photographer in America, and Farhana, a Pakistani-American woman who wants to return to a country she's never seen. Together Nadir and Farhana journey to Pakistan, accompanied by one of her colleagues—who will join her in studying Pakistan's extraordinary glaciers—and by Nadir's oldest friend. But they are not the only interlopers here: a suspect in a recent bombing has arrived just before them, and the authorities' hunt for him casts a dangerous shadow over their journey. It is here, in this magnificent landscape—where glaciers are born of mating ice—that a chance meeting with a young nomad will change their lives, and the lives of those around them, forever.

Thinner than Skin is a haunting tribute to these lands, and to the nomadic life of the indigenous people there, where China encroaches and Pakistanis, Uzbeks, Russians, Chinese, and Afghans all come together to trade. It is a work of piercing beauty and intelligence, and an urgent novel for our times.

Uzma Aslam Khan is the author of three previous novels, including The Geometry of God, named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2009. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published around the world. Read an excerpt of this book in this issue.

In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family's story after her grandmother's death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang's tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together. It is also an eloquent, firsthand account of a people who have worked hard to make their voices heard.

Beginning in the 1970s, as the Hmong were being massacred for their collaboration with the United States during the Vietnam War, Yang recounts the harrowing story of her family's captivity, the daring rescue undertaken by her father and uncles, and their narrow escape into Thailand where Yang was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp. When she was six years old, Yang's family immigrated to America, and she evocatively captures the challenges of adapting to a new place and a new language. Through her words, the dreams, wisdom, and traditions passed down from her grandmother and shared by an entire community have finally found a voice.

Born in a Thai refugee camp in 1980, Kao Kalia Yang immigrated to Minnesota when she was six. Together with her sister, she founded Words Wanted, a company dedicated to helping immigrants with writing, translating, and business services. A graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University, Yang has also recently completed a short film on the Hmong American refugee experience.

History explains what happened in the past; Imagining Vietnam shows us what it was like to live in past times. Eight memorable stories, spanning ten centuries of Vietnamese history, take us back to the drama and excitement of the past. Elizabeth McLean's characters draw us into vivid personal experiences of times gone by. Dramatic, resonant and beautifully crafted, these stories form a triumphant debut from an author with a superb gift for storytelling.

Sisters Tiao and Fan grew up in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution where they witnessed ritual humiliation and suffering. They also witnessed the death of their baby sister in a tragic accident. It was an accident they could have prevented; an accident that will stay with them forever. In the China of the 1990s the sisters lead seemingly successful lives. Tiao is a successful children's publisher but incapable of finding love. Fan has moved to America, desperate to shun her Chinese heritage. Then there is their childhood friend Fei: beautiful, hedonistic and outwardly ambitious. As the women grapple with love, rivalry and past secrets, will they find the freedom and redemption they crave? Spellbinding, unforgettable, and an important chronicle of modern China, The Bathing Women is a powerful and beautiful portrait of the strength of female friendship in the face of adversity.

In 2006 Tie Ning was elected president of the Chinese Writers Association, becoming the youngest writer and first woman to be honored in this way. Her works have been translated into numerous languages including German, French and Spanish. The Bathing Women is her first work translated into English.