Adult Readers Archives - Page 40 of 154

The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel by Margaret Atwood and Reneé Nault, illustrated by Reneé Nault [in Booklist]

15 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Canadian, Fiction, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Repost, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Given the evergreen veneration of Margaret Atwood’s dystopic classic that, since its 1985 publication, has spawned audio, film, radio, theater, opera, and ballet incarnations and, most recently, the wildly popular television series, this graphic novel was certainly inevitable. Canadian artist Reneé Nault is credited...

The Clockmaker’s Daughter by Kate Morton [Booklist]

12 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, British, Fiction, Repost

Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt certainly seems to be an ideal choice to narrate a labyrinthine, multigenerational mystery tied to a posh British countryside home, Birchwood Manor. “And I? I had no choice; I stayed behind,” Froggatt crisply assures Birchwood’s only permanent ghostly resident, who ends...

Five More to Go: Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise [in The Booklist Reader]

10 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, British Asian, Fiction, Filipina/o American, Hapa/Mixed-race, Japanese, Korean, Korean American, Lists, Pakistani, Repost, South Asian, Translation

Trust Exercise by Susan Choi “That whole thing about fiction not being the truth is a lie,” one character admonishes another in Susan Choi’s fifth (and finest) novel. Returning to the multilayered teacher-student power struggles that were seared into My Education (2013), Trust Exercise immediately puts...

Star by Yukio Mishima, translated by Sam Bett [in Booklist]

09 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese, Repost, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Revered writer of dozens of novels, plays, short stories, and essays, Yukio Mishima was an iconic master of the performative existence. A literary sensation by 24 for Confessions of a Mask (1949), a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman about a young homosexual’s hidden identity, fame would be Mishima’s...

The Parisian by Isabella Hammad [in Booklist]

08 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, European, Fiction, Palestinian, Palestinian American, Repost

Born to a Cairo-based merchant father, raised by his paternal grandmother in Nablus, educated in a Constantinople boarding school, Midhat Kamal is already a peripatetic polyglot when he arrives in France. While he studies medicine at the University of Montpellier, he lives with a doctor...

Hazards of Time Travel by Joyce Carol Oates [in Booklist]

05 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost, Young Adult Readers

Prodigious Joyce Carol Oates’ latest novel reads rather like a mash-up of The Hunger Games, The Handmaid’s Tale, even A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In 2039, in the Reconstituted North American States, 17-year-old Adriane Strohl is “the spiky-haired girl with the big glistening...

Letter to Survivors by Gébé, translated by Edward Gauvin [in Booklist]

02 Apr, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, European, Fiction, French, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Repost, Translation, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, they were “that happy family”: two parents, two children, one dog, living in “the house of [their] dreams.” And then they added a coastal apartment and a mountain escape – traversed via luxury car, then adventure mobile – and then...

I Was Their American Dream: A Graphic Memoir by Malaka Gharib [in Booklist]

29 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Egyptian American, Filipina/o American, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Hapa/Mixed-race, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

Malaka Gharib’s Catholic mother regretted leaving her upper-middle-class Manila life, but unrest fueled by the 1970s Marcos regime sent her stateside. Meanwhile, her Egyptian Muslim father “had been scheming to get to America since high school” and finally enrolled at UCLA’s School of Management. They...

The Body Papers by Grace Talusan [in Booklist]

28 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Filipina/o, Filipina/o American, Memoir, Nonfiction, Repost

Every day she didn’t tell, Grace Talusan thought she was saving her grandfather’s life. “There was a daytime grandfather and a nighttime grandfather, two different people in the same body.” Talusan was 7 when that nocturnal monster began the sexual assaults, which spanned seven years....

The House of the Pain of Others: Chronicle of a Small Genocide by Julián Herbert, translated by Christina MacSweeney [in Booklist]

26 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Chinese, Latin American, Latina/o/x, Memoir, Mexican, Mexican American, Nonfiction, Repost, Translation

The “largest mass slaughter of Asians on the American continent” claimed the lives of over 300 Chinese immigrants in May 1911 in Torreón, in the Mexican state of Coahuila. Despite its magnitude, the massacre remains a “buried episode,” obscured by substantial erroneous coverage, that writer,...

Flowers of Mold by Ha Seong-nan, translated by Janet Hong [in Booklist]

25 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Repost, Short Stories, Translation

*STARRED REVIEW Joining a growing cohort of notable Korean imports, Ha Seong-nan’s dazzling, vaguely intertwined collection of 10 stories is poised for Western acclaim. In “Flowers of Doom,” a loner painstakingly studies his neighbors by sifting through their trash – “Garbage never lies” – eventually deciphering...

All That Is Left Is All That Matters by Mark Slouka [in Booklist]

22 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Nonethnic-specific, Repost, Short Stories

James Anderson Foster narrates 13 of 15 stories in Slouka’s newest collection, his second in two decades after his 1998 short-fiction debut, Lost Lake. Fathers and sons, husbands and wives, sons and mothers, men and animals figure prominently here. Foster effortlessly embodies these diverse characters,...

The Lonesome Bodybuilder, by Yukiko Motoya, translated by Asa Yoneda [in Booklist]

21 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Japanese, Repost, Short Stories, Translation

Yukiko Motoya – who’s won major literary awards in her native Japan – makes her English-language debut (Anglophone-enabled by Asa Yoneda) with a label-defying, eyebrow-raising, beguilingly entertaining collection. Six narrators – Natalie Naudus, Brian Nishii, Erin Bennett, Paul Michael Garcia, Tanya Eby, and Kate Mulligan...

Five More to Go: Readymade Bodhisattva, edited by Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park [in The Booklist Reader]

20 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Australian, Chinese American, Fiction, Filipina/o American, Japanese American, Korean, Repost, Short Stories, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction, edited by Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park Tenacious indie nonprofit Kaya Press launches its Magpie Series (which showcases Korean titles in translation that encapsulate “a reflexive picture of Korea and the breakneck speed of its...

Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction, edited by Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park [in Booklist]

19 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Korean American, Repost, Short Stories, Translation, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW Science fiction in Korea is relatively new, initially imported from the West via early-20th-century translations. By the late-1950s, the rapid modernization of postwar South Korea proffered considerable fodder for sf-writer wannabes. Over the following decades, Korea’s ongoing political, socioeconomic, and technological reinventions created fertile...

Princess Bari by Sok-yong Hwang, translated by Sora Kim-Russell [in Booklist]

18 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Korean, Repost, Translation, Young Adult Readers

Because she was the seventh daughter, Princess Bari – whose name means “abandoned” – was discarded as a baby only to return in triumph to save the world. Like her mythic Korean namesake, Bari is the unwanted seventh girl in a house desperate for sons....

Buried Beneath the Baobab Tree by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani [in School Library Journal]

14 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, African, Audio, Fiction, Repost, Young Adult Readers

In Robin Miles’s rich, rhythmic narration, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s (I Do Not Come to You By Chance) latest – written in chapters that are sometimes just a few lines – sounds like verse poetry. The story is hardly soothing, based on interviews with 2014 Boko...

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong [in Library Journal]

13 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Fiction, Repost, Southeast Asian, Southeast Asian American, Vietnamese, Vietnamese American, Young Adult Readers

*STARRED REVIEW The cover calls this a novel, but the autobiographical overlaps are many: a gay Vietnamese American poet, an October birth outside Saigon, an other-side-of-the-world escape, a biracial single mother, a Hartford, CT, upbringing, a New York City education. In his prose debut, T.S. Eliot-prized,...

White Dancing Elephants by Chaya Bhuvaneswar [in Booklist]

11 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, Audio, Fiction, Indian, Indian American, Repost, Short Stories, South Asian, South Asian American

Loss – by disappearance, destruction, or death – looms throughout Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s award-winning debut collection. Priya Ayyar’s shared Indian heritage with both Bhuvaneswar and many of her characters adds a comfortable fluency, as Ayyar gives distinct characterizations to parents and children, siblings and lovers, friends and...

Notes on a Shipwreck: A Story of Refugees, Borders, and Hope by Davide Enia, translated by Antony Shugaar [in Christian Science Monitor]

08 Mar, by SIBookDragon in Adult Readers, African, European, Italian, Memoir, Nonethnic-specific, Nonfiction, Repost

Whom to save, whom to let perish? The rescuers of refugees washing up on the Italian island of Lampedusa face an impossible choice, as memoirist and playwright Davide Enia describes in Notes on a Shipwreck: A Story of Refugees, Borders, and Hope “Calculate. It’s all you can...

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