We are thrilled to announce Jason Mott’s 2021 National Book Award‐winning novel, Hell of a Book, as our featured 2022 Rochester Reads selection. The author will visit Rochester on November 1 - 3, culminating a month of community-based events. Stay tuned for program updates.  

Called “brilliant and inventive” by The Sunday Times (UK) and an “unflinching meditation on racism, violence, and navigating life as a Black man in America . . . a surreal and searing triumph” by Shelf Awareness for Readers, Hell of a Book is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money. It also is about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news.  

“A surrealist feast of imagination that’s brimming with very real horrors, frustrations, and sorrows . . . his is an achievement of American fiction that rises to meet this particular moment with charm, wisdom, and truth." —Bookpage

• Get your copy now 15% off

• Bulk discounts available—email Clara at ampersand@wab.org for details

Ranging from South Asia to the Pacific Islands, the literary achievements of Asian Americans and Asian immigrants, as with the very experiences they chronicle, are varied, rich, and indispensable to the American literary canon. You’re invited to browse some of our favorites -- including the most recent releases from poet Victoria Chang, novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, and essayist Cathy Park Hong.

Browse the full list 30 Leaders in Asian American Literature 

LOCAL SPOTLIGHT: Jaw: Poems, by Albert Abonado

Albert Abonado is a poet and essayist based in Rochester, NY. He holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has received fellowships for poetry from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and he was a finalist for the Kundiman prize. Albert currently teaches creative writing at SUNY Geneseo and the Rochester Institute for Technology.

This is One Way to Dance: Essays, by Sejal Shah

Sejal Shah's stories and essays have appeared  in The Guardian, Brevity, Conjunctions, Guernica, the Kenyon Review Online, Literary Hub, Longreads, and The Rumpus. The recipient of a 2018 NYFA fellowship in fiction, Sejal recently completed a story collection and is at work on a memoir about mental health. She lives in Rochester, New York.

Browse the full list 30 Leaders in Asian American Literature

5% of sales generated by Ampersand’s Essential Reading: Black Lives Matter is helping build the Readings on Justice collection at Rochester’s Arnett Branch Library. To date, over $200 has been raised. You are encouraged to donate and help grow the fund (select “Other” and write “Arnett Library” in the tribute field). 

Browse our Black Lives Matter reading list