Tom Hazard has a condition that's not in any official medical journal. Referred to in the 1890s as "anageria with a soft g," Tom – who was born in March 1581! – is still very much alive, currently working as a London schoolteacher, and appears...
Dreading her twin sister Keiko's visit from Hawai'i, Hanako deliberately delays returning to her Manhattan apartment, but when she does, she finds Kei in the shower, unconscious from a mysterious attack. While Kei lies comatose in the hospital, Hana recalls their inseparable, even interchangeable childhoods...
Blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction, Vassar English professor/journalist Amitava Kumar’s (Husband of a Fanatic) second novel is a hybrid text that moves seamlessly between his partially autobiographically-inspired Indian immigrant graduate student Kailash and numerous real-life figures and events. Kailash arrived in New York as...
"The night before the cousins came, [Lila] couldn't sleep," anticipating the fun she'd have with fellow "big kids" Rosie and Takeo. As soon as they arrive, Lila notices differences: unlike her own "two flat braids," Rosie has "two puffy balls on top of her head"...
Nasty neighbors, otherworldly children, and malevolent monsters populate some of the 22 traditional Japanese folktales in Ozaki’s century-old collection, reissued with an introduction by Australian academic Lucy Fraser. In her 1903 preface, Ozaki – whose father was Japanese, mother, English – that her “stories are not...
In Perfume Bay, a luxurious oasis just outside Los Angeles, pregnant Chinese women are pampered through the U.S. birth of precious progeny who will provide their parents with “a foothold in America.” Among the guests is factory-manager Scarlett Chen, sent to the U.S. to bear...
Before personal and political events finally allowed her to go “home” to South Africa, Sisonke Msimang spent her first 20-plus years in peripatetic exile. Born in Zambia, Msimang and her two younger sisters were “raised on a diet of communist propaganda and schooled in radical...
*STARRED REVIEW Man Asian Literary Prize-winning Kyung-sook Shin (The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness, 2015) alchemizes a brief mention in a French diplomat’s book about his turn-of-the-century Korean tenure into a gorgeous epic that seamlessly combines history and fiction to create a hybrid masterpiece. In 1888, France’s first...
'What We Were Promised' depicts post-Mao China in a deft debut novel set in Shanghai Beyond divisions of class, culture, and background, a single African ivory bracelet connects a Chinese American ex-pat family, their staff who enable their (over)privileged lives, and their left-behind Chinese families in...
*STARRED REVIEW When young Yu’er laments, “People think I’m different,” her grandfather’s immediate response, “Oh, who cares what they think!” sets her free to be just that and more. She’s different because she’s physically challenged, but Grampa ensures her mobility via push cart, wooden chair on...
To his New York City nephew and niece, iconic author and civil rights activist James Baldwin was mostly known as "Uncle Jimmy," although the siblings would realize soon enough that he was also "a famous writer" of world renown. "When you gonna write a book...
*STARRED REVIEW Ten-year-old Ebo has lost his parents, his Uncle Patrick is always drunk, and his older sister Sisi is missing. And then his older brother Kwame vanishes to search for Sisi and find a better life in Europe. With nothing left tying him to their tiny...
*STARRED REVIEW Hunger, both physical and emotional, haunts the lives of the extended Lee-Yun family during the tumultuous, violent decades that define modern South Korea in the latter-20th century. Haemi and Kyunghwan are childhood playmates in the final years of Japan’s brutal colonization, then become desperate,...
More than 65 million people, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, have been forced to leave their homes. Whether they are made refugees in another country or displaced internally, 2017 UN data shows that “nearly 20 people are forcibly displaced every minute as a...
According to 2016 International Labor Organization data, “at least 40 million people are held in servitude.” Among these modern-day slaves was Vannak Anan Prum, a Cambodian man whose determination to finance his pregnant wife’s impending hospital stay sent him away from their village to find...
*STARRED REVIEW That Elizabeth Acevedo narrates her debut novel-in-verse is a sublime gift. She’s undoubtedly the ideal aural arbiter of her spectacular coming-of-age tale about a Harlem teen whose generational, cultural, religious, and emotional conflicts coalesce to teach her “to believe in the power of [her]...
The opening sentence – “The smell of blood woke me” – gives way to a young man discovering his mother’s freshly murdered corpse. He’s gone off his epilepsy medications again, and has trouble remembering, but he’s determined to figure out what happened. Initially, the whodunit and...
The last day of seventh grade for two best-friends-since-babyhood should be a day of jubilant celebration. But Austin's unexpected announcement that he's going off to a competitive soccer camp for a month is news that's "gonna ruin [their] Fun Index," Bina laments. Austin's reaction to skipping...
*STARRED REVIEW Somewhere, a once fertile town has lost its “green and fragrant waves,” the riverbed dried to dust. Deep in a hole in the earth, a small, huddled body hides from shouting voices determined to expose him. Darkness and silence finally allow him to escape “the...
Looming death, missing parents, God, and reinvention turn an unlikely pair, Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall, into lovers at privileged Edwards University in upstate New York. In the fresh, transformative independence that is college life, Phoebe can forget her aching connection to the piano, hide her...
