An octogenarian shoplifter doesn’t quite seem like a likely hero, but British actor Siobhan Waring will certainly make you believe otherwise. Kleptomaniacal Irish matriarch Millie is caught yet again at the village shop and this time her son Kevin (energetically embodied by Irish-born Gary Furlong)...
Oscar Alvarado is a multi-generational Angeleno Mexican American; his wife Keila was a high-school exchange student from Mexico City. They lovingly raised three daughters. Thirty-nine years later, their three-year-old twin granddaughters almost drown in their neglected pool. The accident fuels Keila’s marital discontent and emboldens...
As in her lauded debut short story collection, A House Is a Body (2020), Shruti Swamy examines women’s ownership of their very selves in her first novel, which is set in a disappeared Bombay. Swamy divides Vidya’s young life into five distinct sections, focusing on pivotal...
*STARRED REVIEW The Western publishing world has taken a quarter-century to deliver one of Korea’s most lauded writers to English-reading audiences. Publishing and prize-winning since 1996, Yeo-sun Kwon is deftly translated by award-winning Korean Canadian Janet Hong. At 18, high-school senior Kim Hae-on “was perfection, bliss...
“If I could put it into words, I wouldn’t be drawing it,” the cartoonist insists. In mostly black-and-white panels laden with exquisite details, Zuo Ma intertwines autobiography with fantasy, their relationship revealed some 200 pages into the unpredictable narrative. A young man returns home from city...
*STARRED REVIEW Imbolo Mbue’s PEN/Faulkner-winning Behold the Dreamers unveiled immigrants chasing the American Dream; her searing sophomore title exposes U.S. destruction beyond its borders. In an unnamed African nation, oil giant Pexton has been poisoning the farming village of Kosawa – water, land, air, and people....
*STARRED REVIEW Bilingual Chinese American writer, poet, and translator Ye Chun showcases her linguistic prowess in a prodigious debut collection featuring women on both sides of the globe, many defined and confined by and reliant on motherhood. The titular “hao” recurs, meaning “Good, yes, okay. The most...
Sabina Murray (The Caprices) has built a lofty career on her ability to craft intricately layered, thought-provoking fiction: what she initially presents as straightforward storytelling is intensified with piercing cultural, sociopolitical and historical nuances that encourage greater interaction for deeper satisfaction. The Human Zoo is yet...
Eighteen days is all it takes for the (d)evolution of a marriage in YZ Chin’s debut novel. Edwina and Marlin are green-card-seeking Malaysian transplants to New York City. She’s a quality-assurance analyst (and only woman) at AInstein, where she works on joke-telling robots. He’s a...
*STARRED REVIEW Ray Fawkes's One Soul debuted in 2011, earning extensive adulation (including an Eisner nomination) for its never-before-done graphic presentation of 18 lives via 18-panel grids divided across two-page spreads. His 2014 follow-up, The People Inside, used a similar format to follow 24 individuals through various relationships. One...
Lauren Groff has built a significant career crafting novels and stories featuring sharp observations by and about modern women. In a surprising feat of time travel, the two-time National Book Award finalist (for Fates and Furies and Florida) leaps back to 12th-century England in Matrix and fictionalizes the life...
*STARRED REVIEW Michelle Zauner’s mother Chongmi died in 2014 – she was just 56, Zauner 25. Her grief inspired her first album as Japanese Breakfast in 2016. Her viral 2018 New Yorker essay, “Crying in H Mart,” morphed into the first chapter of this, her dual author/narrator...
Sociology scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs double debuts as author and narrator in her empowering examination of three mothers: Alberta King, Berdis Baldwin, and Louise Little, who “have been almost entirely ignored throughout history,” although their sons are renowned: Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and...
*STARRED REVIEW Mariana Enriquez’s second collection, after 2017’s Things We Lost in the Fire, is insatiably addicting even as the dozen stories are gruesome, lurid, and utterly weird. As a Buenos Aires journalist, she witnessed true horror, the consequences of dictatorship, corruption, 30,000 disappeared; her literary...
Suzanne Park (Loathe at First Sight) crafts another engaging enemies-to-lovers romance in So We Meet Again. Back in junior high, Jessie Kim and Daniel Choi were pitted against each other by their competitive Korean American parents as beacons of near-perfection. Both eventually escaped: Jess landed on...
Time, geographies, and backgrounds all seem to flow effortlessly through Jai Chakrabarti's exquisite debut novel, A Play for the End of the World. At its core is the provenance of a possible love story between two strangers in New York City. Interwoven into this uncertain...
*STARRED REVIEW Prodigious author, journalist, and translator Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Reputations, 2016), one of South America’s most important writers, is once again deftly translated by award-winning Canadian Anne McLean. Four stories provokingly manipulate time. In “Woman on the Riverbank,” a war photographer briefly encounters a politician’s assistant...
The men, mostly young, in memoirist and playwright Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s provoking second story collection lack fulfillment. “Workplace lassitude” is suffocating a 19-year-old wannabe actor stuck at his father’s construction company in “Audition,” while an art-gallery employee fights nine hours of daily tedium in “A, S,...
*STARRED REVIEW The characters in Yoon Choi’s stories are caught in-between cultures, families, generations, even life and death. Especially stupendous are her Korean immigrant women-in-flux. In “The Church of Abundant Life,” a childless woman recalls how she met her husband through her English tutor in Korea...
Patricia Lockwood, who shocked and/or delighted with her memoir, Priestdaddy (2017), continues to disquiet with her new sort-of-in-the-end tragic (but uplifting, too) family drama. Kristen Sieh might be her ideal accomplice, as she oh-so-comfortably ciphers zingers and wisecracks most readers probably never expected to hear,...
