Still a young teenager, Alinda knows only too well the potential horrors of war ...
I confess the main reason I finally plucked this debut novel (written by its author when he was just 23) from my never-shrinking 'to-read' pile was because I found the audible version is narrated by Indian American actor Firdous Bamji. After finishing Amitav Ghosh's The...
Take a careful look at this book cover ...
Houston, 1968 is a tough place to be different. The Long family has just moved from San Antonio to a Houston suburb where Jack Long has taken a new job as "the race reporter" for a local television station. At home, his wife watches the...
As Janie weeps over her first-ever separation from her mother, who is about to give birth, her grandmother admonishes her with the grave responsibility Janie must bear for her new sibling. "In our family ...
Short shorts (of the literary variety, ahem!) are not particularly new. Hemingway (no, I'm not a fan) probably gave the genre its biggest boost with his exemplary six-word version: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." Given our overloaded 21st-century mental circuits, short shorts seem to be just...
I think I will forever remember this book, perhaps not so much for the story, but for a single word: a blind young man sitting in the dark with hands running across the pages answers when asked what he's doing ...
Doh! For some reason, I had no idea the other-worldly adventures of the Picasso/Chiaki dynamic duo [pocket-angel Chiaki directs the surviving Picasso towards doing good deeds for his fellow students] was a trilogy. I figured on a few more years of diving into secret sketches since...
Considered together, this collection of 15 stories is a welcome statement of women's literary empowerment. The second anthology published by FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers' Association founded by novelist/short story writer/playwright-turned Ugandan Cabinet member Mary Karoro Okurut and officially launched in 1996, is testimony that "Ugandan women...
Remember the title of Katherine Boo’s new book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, because you will see it on upcoming nominee lists for the next round of Very Important Literary Prizes. That Boo won the Pulitzer in 2000,...
Allow me to start with two immediate thoughts about content and delivery. Content: Today's Mexican narcos, the Colombian cartels, the Afghan/Pakistani smuggling rings utterly pale in comparison to the British and American opium runners demanding access to 19th-century China. You might have studied the distant...
More and more, I've noticed book cover flaps yielding important tidbits (which makes me a bit concerned about such covers going astray, especially for picture books handled by so many little hands!). But worry aside, how fitting to find this on the front flap about...
"Dear Mr. Jean Paul Sartre, I know that you are dead and old and also a philosopher. So, on an obvious level, you and I do not have a lot in common." Thus begins 15-year-old Tina's class project for her English Honors elective on existential...
Can anyone really understand such a number: 5,400,000. The death of a single loved one can leave you staggering and lost ...
Few Nepali writers have thus far landed on western bookshelves, with only two exceptions who come immediately to mind – elegant Samrat Upadhyay (Arresting God in Kathmandu, The Royal Ghosts) and activist Manjushree Thapa (The Tutor of History, Seasons of Flight). So to find another Nepali author writing in English is a...
An aborted suicide is probably not the most solid basis from which to start a lasting friendship ...
Maaza Mengiste's voice, delivered by telephone many thousands of miles away, sounds impossibly young and happy. She’s easy to talk to, easy to laugh with. She’s in Rome for another few months, enjoying the spring sun, sipping another cup of tea in a nearby café,...
Chapter 1: an ultra high-tech building with an especially remarkable elevator (although without the usual, mundane details like floor buttons), loose change that suddenly doesn't add up, a beautiful (chubby) young woman in everything pink who might have said "Proust" (or maybe "Truest? ...
The first sentence of Tsitsi Dangarembga's semi-autobiographical novel sets a haunting tone: "I was not sorry when my brother died." With his death, 13-year-old Tambu is presented with a profound opportunity: even though she's a girl, as the now-eldest child in her poor village family...
What does it take to update a 60+-year-old story? In the case of Usamaru Furuya's 21st-century manga adaptation of the literary classic Ningen Shikkaku, a semi-autobiographical novel by Dazai Osamu (published in 1948 in Japan, translated into English as No Longer Human in 1958), an...
