*STARRED REVIEW With Han Kang’s The Vegetarian awarded the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, her follow-up will garner extra scrutiny. Bottom line? This new work, again seamlessly translated by Deborah Smith, who also provides an indispensable contextual introduction, is even more stupendous. Han drops readers into a...
*STARRED REVIEW A mother, Soledad, flees Cuba, abandoning her revolutionary husband Uxmal and absconding with their 12-year-old twins Ulises and Isabel. She bypasses Miami for Hartford, CT, finding work as a court stenographer, making her the transcriber of other people's words. Although Uxmal’s presence never seems to...
The dozen stories in Ali Smith's (How To Be Both) latest collection share a common characteristic: a contagious sense of wordplay, from obscure etymology ("buxom" originally meant "obedient, compliant, gracious") in "Last," to multiple meanings of "fraud" linking D.H. Lawrence to credit card theft in...
*STARRED REVIEW A decade after her international best-selling debut, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), Min Jin Lee’s follow-up is an exquisite, haunting epic that crosses almost a century, four generations, and three countries while depicting an ethnic Korean family that cannot even claim a single shared...
*STARRED REVIEW August, an Ivy League-pedigreed, peripatetic anthropologist who studies death in the farthest reaches of the world, returns home to Brooklyn to bury her father. A chance subway meeting with a childhood friend plunges August back into memories of another Brooklyn of the 1970s, when...
*STARRED REVIEW "There's magic in this world. And miracles." In his second translated work to hit stateside (after The Investigation), bestselling Korean author J.M. Lee – again linguistically enabled by gifted translator Chi-Young Kim – will make you believe. Lee's silent protagonist sits in a New York...
*STARRED REVIEW Although publishing 10 months after Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer, this collection precedes his novel by decades (the earliest entry dates from 1997). In a pre-Pulitzer interview, Nguyen credits his 15-year experience "characterized by drudgery and despair, laced with...
Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, MO. Lezley McSpadden didn't see her 18-year-old son die, "but as his mother, I do know one thing better than anyone, and that's how to tell my son's...
*STARRED REVIEW Although separated from philandering husband Christopher for six months, a London woman agrees to continue to postpone "the process…of telling people." Almost a month has passed since she last talked to Christopher, rendering her unable to answer his mother Isabella's unexpected request for his...
The Recovered & The Unrestored Let me begin with a reader’s confession: Without a doubt, Shobha Rao’s debut, An Unrestored Woman, is the best short fiction collection I’ve read this year. These dozen stories are savage and empathetic, brutal and lyrical, mournful and celebratory as well. At...
*STARRED REVIEW In a dual narrative, Leila Aboulela (Minaret; Lyrics Alley), winner of the inaugural Caine Prize for African Writing, exposes the impossibility of definitively taking sides. In 2010 Scotland, the global war on terror pixilates the lives of history professor Natasha, her student Oz, and...
In a remote mountain village, the survival of an Akha tribe, one of China’s 55 ethnic minorities, depends on tea. Rigid traditions prohibit Li-yan from keeping her newborn. She saves her daughter by leaving her in a nearby town, wrapped in blankets with a tea...
Colin Dickey (Afterlives of the Saints) cites a statistic that 45 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, and 30 percent profess to have had firsthand encounters. Such undying fascination means there was no shortage of stories to choose from when Dickey spent several years traveling...
Mele, single mother of Ellie, joined the San Francisco Mother's Club (SFMC) to be matched with the perfect playgroup, something that never happened. Two years later, she's part of a rogue, "laughing, sh*t-talking, texting, even talking on the phone" fivesome that came together organically at...
*STARRED REVIEW Yan Lianke's latest translated-into-English title offers multiple rewarding options. As straightforward narrative, it follows the astounding transformation of Explosion, a rural mountain village, into a "megalopolis" through the entangled lives of the Kong family's four sons – a teacher, a politician, a soldier, and...
Mao Dun Award–winning novelist Liu Zhenyun (The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon, 2015) adroitly confronts Very Big Topics – family, education, work, bureaucracy, the military, history – in his first translated-into-English story collection. “Tofu” exposes the numbing tribulations of being a poor family...
Tokyo-born, Berlin-domiciled Yoko Tawada (Facing the Bridge, 2007) returns with another fantastical and entertaining novel that combines a broken family saga, socio-political-environmental enlightenment, a treatise on writing, and bitingly well-placed satire. Seamlessly translated from German by the award-winning Susan Bernofsky, Memoirs of a Polar Bear introduces...
An ephemeral, atmospheric painting, Elegy, is at the core of Wendy Lee’s third and most ambitious novel (Happy Family, 2008; Across a Green Ocean, 2015). An unknown, 30-year-sojourning Chinese artist is paid a pittance to recreate a missing canvas. A desperate New York gallery owner...
As explosive growth transforms 1970s South Korea into an international powerhouse, sociopolitical upheaval becomes unavoidable in daily life. Into the maelstrom of such spectacular change, first-novelist Grace Yoojin Wuertz – Seoul-born, U.S.-raised, Yale- and NYU-degreed – drops two women onto the elite campus of Seoul...
On Secrets and the Long, Long Process Journalist Vanessa Hua spent the last couple of decades filing articles from around the globe – China and Ecuador, Burma and Panama, and beyond – which surely gave her the worldly familiarity that resonates throughout her fiction debut, Deceit...
