Books like Lolas' House by M. Evelina Galang

A novel.

George L. Hicks exposes the organized system of Japanese ‘comfort stations’ in World War II, detailing how women were coerced into prostitution and how the Japanese government concealed the atrocity.

"A vibrant new voice ups the self-deprecating memoir ante with tragicomic tales of her dysfunctional life in swampland Florida and America's Big Easy. A dive bar palm reader who calls herself the Disco Queen Taiwan; a slumlord with a penis-of-the-day LISTSERV; and Betty, the middle-aged Tales of the Cocktail volunteer who soils her pants on a party bus and is dealt with in the worst possible way. These are just a few of the unforgettable characters who populate Gwendolyn Knapp's hilarious and heartbreaking--yet ultimately uplifting--memoir debut, After a While You Just Get Used to It. Growing up in a dying breed of eccentric Florida crackers, Knapp thought she had it rough--what with her pack rat mother, Margie; her aunt Susie, who has fewer teeth than prison stays; and Margie's bipolar boyfriend, John. But not long after Knapp moves to New Orleans, Margie packs up her House of Hoarders and follows along. As if Knapp weren't struggling enough to keep herself afloat, working odd jobs and trying to find love while suffering from irritable bowel syndrome, the thirty-year-old realizes that she's never going to escape her family's unendingly dysfunctional drama. Knapp honed her writing chops and distinctive Southern Gothic-humor style writing short pieces and participating in the renowned reading series Literary Death Match. Now, like bestselling authors Jenny Lawson, Laurie Notaro, and Julie Klausner before her, Knapp bares her sad and twisted life for readers everywhere to enjoy"--

A firsthand diary of a woman’s eight weeks in Berlin from April to June 1945, documenting the city’s collapse, Soviet occupation, and the daily horrors of war and survival.

With Dusk (originally published in the Philippines as Po-on), F. Sionil Jose begins his five-novel Rosales Saga. Set in the 1880s, Dusk records the exile of a tenant family from its village and the new life it attempts to make in the small town of Rosales. Here commences the epic tale of a family unwillingly thrown into the turmoil of history. But this is more than a historical novel; it is also the eternal story of man's tortured search for true faith and the larger meaning of existence. Jose carefully begins to paint a portrait of his country, showing the terrible physical and emotional hardships the people endure as the Philippines is transformed by the "liberation" from Spanish rule and by the oppression that continues, even as the Americans take over. Still, far from drawing a picture of hopelessness, Jose' has achieved a fiction of extraordinary scope and passion, a book as meaningful to Philippine literature as One Hundred Years of Solitude is to Latin American literature.

From the Publisher: In an era marked by atrocities perpetrated on a grand scale, the tragedy of the so-called comfort women-mostly Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army-endures as one of the darkest events of World War II. These women have usually been labeled victims of a war crime, a simplistic view that makes it easy to pin blame on the policies of imperial Japan and therefore easier to consign the episode to a war-torn past. In this revelatory study, C. Sarah Soh provocatively disputes this master narrative. Soh reveals that the forces of Japanese colonialism and Korean patriarchy together shaped the fate of Korean comfort women-a double bind made strikingly apparent in the cases of women cast into sexual slavery after fleeing abuse at home. Other victims were press-ganged into prostitution, sometimes with the help of Korean procurers. Drawing on historical research and interviews with survivors, Soh tells the stories of these women from girlhood through their subjugation and beyond to their efforts to overcome the traumas of their past. Finally, Soh examines the array of factors-from South Korean nationalist politics to the aims of the international women's human rights movement-that have contributed to the incomplete view of the tragedy that still dominates today.

"Accountability and redress for Imperial Japan's wartime "comfort women" have provoked international debate in the past two decades. Yet there has been a dearth of first-hand accounts available in English from the women abducted and enslaved by the Japanese military in Mainland China -- the major theatre of the Asia-Pacific War. Chinese Comfort Women features the personal stories of the survivors of this devastating system of sexual enslavement. Offering insight into the conditions of these women's lives prior to and after the war, it points to the social, cultural, and political environments that prolonged their suffering. Through personal narratives from twelve Chinese "comfort station" survivors, this book reveals the unfathomable atrocities committed against women during the war and correlates the proliferation of "comfort stations" with the progression of Japan's military offensive. Drawing on investigative reports, local histories, and witness testimony, Chinese Comfort Women puts a human face on China's war experience and on the injustices suffered by hundreds of thousands of Chinese women."--Publisher's website. Contains primary source material.