Love Medicine, written by Louise Erdrich and originally published in 1984, was reprinted in 1993 by HarperPerennial Library when the author added five new chapters to the novel. This book is a series of interwoven stories about different generations in a Native American family. In 1985, Amy Tan read this book and was influenced heavily by it when she wrote The Joy Luck Club.

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts, originally published in 1976, is a memoir of a Chinese-American girl growing up in Stockton, California. There are two worlds that the girl lives between, America—the place her parents emigrated to—and China, which the girl hears about in her mother's "talk-stories." Written by Maxine Hong Kingston, the first critically successful Asian-American writer in the United States, the book helped pave the way for Asian-American writers like Amy...