ACTA Celebrates the Literary Contributions of the AAPI Community 

In The Thinking Machine, Stephen Witt chronicles the life and career of Jensen Huang, a Taiwanese-American electrical engineer who founded the startup NVIDIA and helped launch a Silicon Valley revolution. Witt recounts how Huang combined mathematical brilliance and mercurial ambition to launch NVIDIA from a Denny’s restaurant, building it into a multitrillion-dollar empire surpassing Microsoft and Apple in value. The narrative combines interviews, technical science, and biographical detail to construct a portrait of how Huang’s gamble kickstarted the fastest-growing industry in the world.

In Klara and the Sun, Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro applies his skills as a humanist and rhetorician to examine the ethics of AI through the fictional story of Klara, an AI-powered android. The novel’s blunt realism and morally gray characters challenge assumptions once taken for granted about the intrinsic value of human life and the soul in an era where individuals can be effortlessly replaced with a few lines of code. The novel’s disturbingly convincing arguments against the worth of a human life intentionally create discomfort to draw attention to the slippery ethical slope created by AI development.

Learning a language is a sure way to learn about the world’s cultures and knowledge. Salman Rushdie’s 2021 essay collection, Languages of Truth, celebrates the immense power, beauty, and danger of language, covering everything from translation and censorship to mythology and storytelling. Languages of Truth compiles two decades of Rushdie’s essays, speeches, and lectures on topics including Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Tolstoy, alongside analyses of pop culture and his personal experience with multilingualism as an Indian-born immigrant forced to flee west and adopt a new culture and language.

Night Sky with Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong’s award-winning poetry debut, treats the perennial topics of grief, identity, love, and ancestry through the lens of the immigrant experience. The book blends the contemporary with the timeless by integrating the Odyssey, Federico García Lorca, Orpheus, and more in poems on the Vietnam War, generational trauma, and Vuong’s relationship with his mother.

In Angel Island, historians Erika Lee and Judy Yung describe the forgotten “Ellis Island of the West,” an immigration processing center that welcomed hundreds of thousands of immigrants from China, Japan, Russia, and Mexico—and denied tens of thousands more. Lee and Young, both descendants of Chinese immigrants detained at Angel Island, compile government documents, diaries, engraved poems, oral narratives, and archival records to tell the story of exclusion acts, deportations, and xenophobia, but also triumph, resilience, and the steady growth of the American dream.

In Fault Lines, award-winning Indian-American economist Raghuram G. Rajan analyzes the forces that led to the 2008 financial crisis. Rajan argues that reckless banks and poor regulation were not the sole causes, pointing to an overreliance on consumer activity and political forces that drove governmental overstimulation of the economy. Fault Lines solidified his place as a leading expert and overturned assumptions about the 2008 crash, inequality, and the future of the American economy.

In Matariki, Rangi Matamua, the first Maori winner of New Zealand’s Prime Minister’s Science Prize, tells the story of the Pleiades star cluster. Combining astronomy, physics, and mythology, Matariki chronicles the Pleiades’ role in Maori life throughout the centuries. Throughout the narrative, technical analysis of cluster movement and harvest cycles coexists with sweeping folktales about gods and fates decorating the skies. This book is perfect for anyone interested in blending scientific rigor with cultural celebration.