Yu Hua's unforgettable tome requires a solid commitment in time and patience, yet your reward for finishing the final page will make your investment amply worthwhile. The opening paragraph begins with the end: "Baldy Li, our Liu Town's premier tycoon," sits contemplating his life on his...
On a long flight to Korea, I took the Park Sisters along to sweeten the tedious ride. I was barreling my way toward an international children’s literature festival where I was scheduled to talk about Korean American literature and, of course, the sisters and their...
In anticipation of tomorrow's frightfest, thought I should share some deathly dystopian manga – ikigami literally translating to 'death paper.' While each volume could potentially stand alone as a series of individual episodes that detail how the chosen spend their predetermined final 24 hours, you'll need to start from...
Check out the earnest determination on an oh-so-young Kenji's face as he announces, "Justice never dies." Four decades later, his surviving renegade friends are desperately trying to keep his prophetic, childhood words alive: "I'm saving this world from evil, no matter what happens!!" Two of the...
* STARRED REVIEW Krys Lee, whose peregrinations originated and are currently paused in Korea with formative stopovers in the U.S. and England, infuses the nine stories of her breathtaking debut with the consequences of dislocation – whether forced because of war, or chosen by virtue of...
Before I let myself even open Michael Ondaatje's newest title, The Cat's Table, which hit shelves earlier this month, I was determined to read his previous novels that I had somehow missed. The realization that I have now earned access to Table is rather bittersweet as...
As most Haruki Murakami fans as well aware, the countdown to the pub date of his latest 1Q84 ends after this weekend ...
In less than a week, you can be holding 1Q84, Haruki Murakami's long-awaited spectacular title finally available in English, which hits shelves on October 25. You might choose to hold out until November 8 when the audible version is scheduled for release. All 944 pages (on paper...
Oh, those complicated but charming men who wander in and out of the kitchen, creating and serving the most toothsome fare at the Casetta dell'Orso ...
Luis Alberto Urrea's 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for General Nonfiction reads like a heart-thumping thriller, complete with big cars and big guns, desperate men and boys, waiting women, and an enormous body count. That the story is true instantly turns it into a modern tragedy of epic...
Before you open Somaly Mam's astonishing memoir, you need to be prepared to bear witness to some of the most horrific acts a human being can commit against another, especially helpless young girls. Once you begin, the frank, unmitigated writing will not allow you to...
Having been so enthralled by MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Yiyun Li’s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, then her novel, The Vagrants, I admit I held off on this, her latest collection, for over a year. I seem to have difficulty immediately reading the newest book of...
No one has such an unpredictable, quirky, downright wacky imagination as Haruki Murakami. And even though your brain knows he's created an impossible universe, everything on the page seems so convincing, you'll go along for the ride – any ride with Murakami at the helm. Even almost...
All is definitely not fair in love and war ...
Ha Jin has lived through difficult, defining events: the Cultural Revolution in his native China, military service that began when he was a young teenager, immigration and subsequent separation from home and family. On the page, he has vividly reproduced the repression of the Cultural...
Since Craig Thompson's Habibi hit shelves last week (official release date was last Tuesday, September 20), I guess the secret of its magnificence is out ...
Eight years have passed (far too quickly) since I last saw the inimitable Jessica Hagedorn. Her 2003 novel, Dream Jungle, was about to come out and we were in desperate search of boba tea in New York’s East Village. Faced with a closed tea salon...
Melissa Fay Greene first arrived last spring in my mailbox via her latest book, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet, and made me cry. But she also left me tickled with joyous laughter at the antics of her sprawling, multiplying, multi-ethnic family. While Biking made me...
An 18-year-old boy, Camilo, is dead, his youthful body prepared and confined forever in a coffin that now sits in a living room, attended by his estranged parents on either side. Through the course of the inaugural night that marks his sudden, violent passing, his...
Eight years have passed since Jeffrey Eugenides won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (as well as too many other accolades to list) for this, his second novel, and nine years since it was first published. Nine years later (pattern forming here? – his debut The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex are also...
