Teens and young adult women populate the majority of Girls of a Certain Age, an intriguing first collection by Maria Adelmann. At least eight of these 13 stories were previously published as early as 2014, many in prestigious literary journals. As with many debuts, Girls proves...
International headlines about the 2012 Delhi rape victim exposed the Indian megacity as “the rape capital of the world,” spurring award-winning journalist Sonia Faleiro (Beautiful Thing, 2012) to “find out, and to gather my findings in a book-length study of rape in India.” She finds...
*STARRED REVIEW Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-winning Canadian Japanese novelist/poet Hiromi Goto (Half World, 2010) makes her stupendous graphic debut, in splendid artistic synchronization with Ignatz-nominated Ann Xu. “It never felt right here,” Kumiko thinks as she sneaks out of an assisted-living facility her daughters thought would be the...
Nicole Krauss hasn’t audiobooked since joining an all-star cast for the aural adaptation of Etgar Keret’s collection, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door (2012). She is clearly an ideal choice for narrating her own writing in this, her full aural debut, with her collection examining and...
Proceed with Caution is the title of this collection as well as one of the stories in it. Readers might also take the phrase as warning: nothing is quite what it seems in Argentinian Patricia Ratto's fascinating English-language debut. Translated by retired Spanish professor and...
Back in 1977, “Anacostia was still the New World, an isle of blood and desire.” In Washington, DC-native Morowa Yejidé’s (Time of the Locust, 2014) moody, bleak sophomore title, boundaries between the living and the dead are indiscernible. Once upon a time, Nephthys and Osiris...
Before Jayci Lee’s latest even hit shelves, Lost/Hawaii Five-0 heartthrob Daniel Dae Kim optioned the rom-com as producer and star. Before Kim goes celluloid, narrator Natalie Naudus whets your appetite with this delectably sweet happily-ever-after affair. With his borrowed car broken down in tiny Weldon, California, celebrity food critic...
*STARRED REVIEW Not until the last of this ingenious seven-story collection do readers get the most intimate glimpse of Don Henrik, and even then, only through the lens of his not-quite stepson. Henrik, however, is the single connecting character in Rodrigo Fuentes's U.S. debut, Trout, Belly...
*STARRED REVIEW Penn State University Press, already a publisher of award-winning graphic titles, launches a new imprint, Graphic Mundi, showcasing comics intent on “drawing our worlds together.” Among its inaugural line-up is French comics artist Espé’s spectacular, autobiographically inspired homage to a childhood haunted by mental...
For much of the 12 hours here, prolific Shiromi Arserio’s crisp-yet-soft, melodic-but-never-sing-songy voice seems just right for narrating Australian journalist Rebecca Giggs’ stupendous cetacean debut. The London native’s aural transfer to Down Under is mostly convincing, but when she moves beyond English, her fluency stumbles...
That Danielle Geller survived to write Dog Flowers seems miraculous. Her raw debut might need a content warning: abandonment, alcoholism, attempted suicide, domestic violence, parental incarcerations, family deaths – much of which is intrinsically linked to her enigmatic, missing mother. In bearing elegiac witness to...
At 24, “in 1994, or maybe 1995 already,” French artist Élodie Durand first began experiencing symptoms – what her family would later call her “spells” – that included abrupt memory loss and erratic behavior, such as baseless rage and violent outbursts. Her diagnosis of epilepsy...
Spare in pages, Elvira Navarro’s collection of 11 short stories proves dense with disconnection, dysfunction, and dismay as families fray, couples sunder, and animals are brutalized. Set between the seemingly familiar and elusively surreal, Navarro’s tales unsettle readers through oneiric landscapes. In “Rabbit Island,” a non-inventor...
*STARRED REVIEW “They wanted to start a family, and now they’ve destroyed one,” Gabriel laments. When that family – including his closest friends – all gathered for a surprise party for his 75th birthday, Gabriel was still a grandfather to beloved Qinaya, adopted by his son,...
Six years since his first novel, The Sympathizer, won the Carnegie Medal and the Pulitzer Prize, Việt Thanh Nguyễn is back with the much-anticipated second installment in a planned trilogy. Here, the same unreliable narrator adds another few hundred pages to the already 367-page confession he...
Sherlock Holmes’ archnemesis, Professor James Moriarty, appeared in only six of Arthur Conan Doyle’s oeuvre, but popular manga-maker Ryosuke Takeuchi – with energetically animated art by Hikaru Miyoshi – continues to indulge his own empathy for villains in the second volume of many more to come. Here, the...
The lively cast of Front Desk returns with narrator Sunny Lu, adding much-appreciated continuity. A relative audiobook newbie, Lu proves her expertise in ciphering middle graders to middle-aged adults. That she’s also an attorney makes the lawyers here – both the pompous and the heroic –...
SIXTY-EIGHT narrators get credited with creating the aural spectacle of Neil Gaiman’s legendary graphic epic. Debuting officially in 1989, the original comic series concluded in 1996, although reprints, compilations, adaptations, and spin-offs have as never ceased. Among the vast cast – quite possibly the largest...
On her 15th birthday, Janey's mother confesses that her thought-to-be-sperm-banked father is actually a real person still living in the southern Iowa town from which her mother escaped by going to New York City to "give her coming daughter a better life." Janey ignores her...
Best Audiobooks of 2020 by Stephanie Klose and Terry Hong This year’s top audiobooks, selected by LJ’s audio editor and reviewers, represent the best recorded literature published between November 2019 and December 2020. In a year that’s been like no other, these picks moved us, provided escape, and...
