Casey Brienza: Manga in America: Transnational Book Publishing and the Domestication of Japanese Comics Bloomsbury Academic, New York, New York, 2016, 214 pp, Paperback, $ 29.95, ISBN: 978-4725-9587-4

• Published in: Publishing Research Quarterly Vol. 32; no. 4; pp. 331 - 332
• Main Author: Pantumsinchai, Penn
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 2016; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Brienza, Casey; Business; Domestication; Library Science; Manga; Manual workers; Methodology of the Social Sciences; Nonfiction; Printing and Publishing; Publishing industry; Social Sciences; Transnationalism; New York; San Francisco California; United States > US; Japan; Book Publishing; Industry Professional; Poor Working Condition; Book Publishing Industry; Publishing Industry
• ISSN: 1053-8801; 1936-4792
• DOI: 10.1007/s12109-016-9482-3

Manga in America (2016) is not only Brienza’s first self-authored book, but it is also the first book to conduct a theoretically informed, in-depth examination of the American manga publishing industry. Brienza defines manga as “comics from Japan plus anything else the industry so chooses to label as such” (12), a definition that taps into the expanding definition of the word as well as well as the industry, as it tries to keep up with globalized consumers of the digital age. The cover of the book is indicative of the contents—a young woman works on a manga page on her computer in her overly pink room, surrounded by icons of Japanese culture i.e. Doraemon, Totoro, Pikachu, and so forth. While the book is centered on explaining the process of ‘domestication,’ Brienza’s term for the labor-intensive work of bringing manga to American audiences, it also provides a rare insight into the lived experiences of manga industry laborers in America, who are mostly women.