Thanks to Annie, her college roommate and best friend, Mae's escaped from her stupefying utilities job in her "wretched" hometown and entered the Circle, an enviable high-tech company (think Google + Apple + steroids) where Annie is one of the "Gang of 40"-power wielders. Mae begins...
"For any serious artist, it is a terrible feeling of surrender when you realize there is no place in the world for your voice, when all that you express seems marginalized or in vain ...
Just as her latest book was hitting shelves, the near-deified Isabel Allende opened mouth, inserted foot during an interview on NPR and set off a firestorm of negative reaction. On mysteries, she intoned, "I will take the genre, write a mystery that is faithful to...
Alphabet and counting books are understandably so predictable as to often be interchangeable in their sameness. ABCs and 123s are really immutable ...
Meg Wolitzer's latest bestseller begins with an intricate overview of the hierarchy of privileged teenagers. In the summer of 1974, six 15- and 16-year-olds meet in Boys' Teepee 3 at Spirit-in-the-Woods, an arts-focused summer camp for the entitled, and baptize themselves the titular Interestings. Four of the...
While watching evening TV that's been interrupted by a special bulletin about the unending "wave of child abductions in Lisbon," Eurico nods off, only to be jarred awake by the ringing telephone. He's late again to his pizza delivery job, where his boss thinks he's...
Theater producer/critic/playwright Warren Hoffman (The Passing Game) insists that audiences have been "duped" into believing that the Broadway musical "is the most innocent of art forms when, in fact, it is one of America's most powerful, influential, and even at times polemical arts precisely because...
Almost two years after Vaddey Ratner made her New York Times bestselling debut with In the Shadow of the Banyan – her fictionalized account of her survival, as a young child, of the Khmer Rouge genocide that took most of her family along with some two million others...
*STARRED REVIEW "I do not specifically reveal the era or elucidate Korea's political situation," writes Kyung-sook Shin, recipient of the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize for Please Look After Mom, in the ending of her latest spectacular novel in English translation. Ironically, those missing details make this story...
"To transform suffering into art": Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan While the Vietnam War ended for the United States with the April 1975 military withdrawal, death and destruction continued, moving into neighboring Cambodia and Laos. With the evacuation of U.S. troops, the Communist...
Whenever I hear that a book is about to be transformed into celluloid, I get into a little panic to read the original, oftentimes titles I ironically wouldn't have opened otherwise. Occasionally, I'm pleasantly rewarded, Miss Peregrine among those few that fill me with literary gratitude....
Although our son incessantly watched various versions of the Avatar series on television and even more often on DVD, I had little knowledge for years of who's who or what's what. The casting controversy of the 2010 film version disastrously directed by M. Night Shyamalan is what...
Over the past couple weeks, I've been a bit of an ethnic voyeur, picking up bestselling 'mainstream' titles in search of their APAness. I confess I picked up Wally Lamb's latest purely because I somehow learned the protagonist is named Annie Oh – Oh usually being a Korean...
"If this book leads to even a single rescue, then my time in bondage was worth it," Shyima Hall writes in the penultimate paragraph in the final chapter of her new memoir. That "time in bondage" she refers to is four long years during which...
What is it about panda bears that makes them soooo utterly irresistible? Click here to see if you could possibly be immune to those "chubbly-wubbly." Curmudgeon that I usually am, even I succumbed to "beary love." Jon Muth personally knows their inevitably undeniable appeal: his giant panda, Stillwater,...
I spent my last birthday with Sherman Alexie ...
