“I’m still getting used to the idea of being a writer”: Q&A with Angie Kim True confession: A few years ago, our mutual friend, the writer Marie Myung-Ok Lee (not a Bloomer – Marie had a first-ever YA fiction multi-book deal with a major publisher in...
Reminiscent of Arthur Schnitzler’s late-19th-century play La Ronde (and the dozens of multi-genre adaptations since), Helon Habila’s (Oil on Water, 2011) fourth novel is a round-the-world journey that links disparate, desperate strangers. An unnamed African history scholar (his PhD pending) and his American wife, Gina, relocate from Arlington,...
Ready for some double duty? As you may know, May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (woo-hoo! happy me!). Additionally, May is also #MysteryMonth at Booklist. To celebrate, here’s a list that hasn’t been done before on The Booklist Reader: mysteries and thrillers by #OwnVoices APA writers. I know, such...
Much like the 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent imprisoned during WWII by FDR’s Executive Order 9066, Muslim Americans are rounded up and incarcerated in an alternate, albeit all-too-familiar U.S. following the 2016 presidential election. Seventeen-year-old Layla and her parents are forcibly removed from their Los...
He’s had almost two dozen names, yet his story was forgotten for 40 years. More recently, despite their violent 20th-century histories, four countries – China, Japan, and his native Korea, now cleaved into North and South – all claim him as a local hero. Perhaps best...
May is Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Month. Why May? The first Japanese people immigrated to the United States on May 7, 1843, and the transcontinental railroad – built mostly with immigrant Chinese labor – was completed on May 10, 1869. In 1977, Congressional legislation...
Two side-by-side 1840s stable houses in New York City's Greenwich Village initially boarded "the horses of the affluent." In the century-plus since, the neighborhood welcomed immigrants from around the world, and matured into "the creative center of New York City." In 1930, the double buildings...
P.J. Ochlan returns to voice the internationally bestselling Japanese author’s latest to arrive Stateside. Previously the voice of Detective Galileo in another series by Keigo Higashino, Ochlan assumes the second of the Detective Kyoichiro Kaga series following Malice in 2014. With Higashino’s signature vast casts, Ochlan’s...
The one thing in life that’s guaranteed is, well, death. But books are certainly a lasting legacy. And sometimes, when we get the books after their creator has passed on, an audiobook can breathe life into the text, animating from beyond. Here, we have a handful...
The eerie chill factor proves unrelenting throughout Sophie Mackintosh’s 2018 debut, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and is further intensified by three formidable narrators who take turns revealing the dissolution of an isolated, splintered family. Grace, Lia, and Sky are three daughters – their...
Organized by the Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month, in April, has been celebrated annually since 1996. While reading, writing, even performing poetry should be a year-round activity, National Poetry Month is a welcome catalyst to get verse newbies and doubters interested and involved. In...
The emphatic "Where are you from?," often aggressively repeated with "Where are you really from?" is an all-too-familiar scenario for many people of color who call the United States "home." On the playground, at ballet class, at a playdate, one little girl attempts to answer simply: "I'm...
His voice isn’t quite growling, but David Shih has perfected the notable ability to suggest deep, underlying anger without crossing into full-blown fury. That control makes him Wesley Yang’s ideal conduit in this debut collection of 13 essays that lay bare Yang’s exasperation, indignation, doubt,...
*STARRED REVIEW In 2015, A Manual for Cleaning Women collected 43 stories Lucia Berlin left before her 2004 death, making her an overnight – albeit posthumous – literary sensation. Here are 22 more, presented in some semblance of chronological order, mirroring Berlin’s own peripatetic exploits (Texas,...
Since Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice in 1813, hundreds of adaptations have followed, but Soniah Kamal is the first to set the affair in Pakistan, her birth country. Meet feisty girls’-school English-literature teacher Alys Binat and arrogant Valentine Darsee. The rest is ...
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood and Reneé Nault In the decades since its 1985 publication, Margaret Atwood’s dystopic classic has spawned audio, film, radio, theater, opera, ballet incarnations, and, most recently, the wildly popular television series (which veers significantly from the original, ahem). Given the evergreen...
*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...
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...
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...
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...
