*STARRED REVIEW When Anthony Shadid’s own nuclear family falls apart – his marriage ends, he’s separated from his only child – he returns to Marjayoun, Lebanon in August, 2007 with “foolish and rash ...
Best known for her canonic, autobiographical short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and her nonfiction declaration, Women and Economics, Charlotte Perkins Gilman remains one of history’s greatest feminists. Written in 1915, Herland was initially serialized in Gilman’s own magazine, The Forerunner, but didn’t appear in book-form until 1979. That she...
“I am making dying bearable for myself,” Cory Taylor reveals in her final book, originally published in her native Australia just months after she passed away in 2016 from melanoma-related brain cancer at 61. A euthanasia drug she bought online allowed Taylor some semblance of...
*STARRED REVIEW Ted Chiang, whose 1998 novella “Story of Your Life” (included in Stories of Your Life and Others, 2002) became the Oscar-nominated film Arrival, returns with another intriguing collection comprised of seven previously published stories plus two new ones. Edoardo Ballerini voices four, Dominic Hoffman...
In April 2017, 41-year-old Park died of stomach cancer. His sophomore title was published 17 months later, aided by a close friend for over two decades, the novelist Curtis Sittenfeld, who played a significant role in deciphering Park’s final handwritten notes in order to get...
*STARRED REVIEW In early 1940s wartime Berlin, an official letter arrives for Otto and Anna Quangel with the unbearable news that their only son is dead. Anna immediately rejects “‘those common lies ...
Septuagenarian Stanley Huang declares he’ll start a foundation to give his name the longevity his body can’t. His second wife Mary has made his comfort her top priority. His first wife Linda Liang left him financially sound, obscuring his inadequacies in exchange for her freedom. Harvard...
The miracles were many: “born poor and blind in Vietnam on the losing side of a bloody civil war,” Julie Yip-Williams survived her grandmother’s demand to have her killed, escaped on a leaky boat with her family to Hong Kong, arrived as a refugee in...
Soneela Nankani instills a just-under-the-surface rage in Kat, a biracial Oakland teen who barely escaped being raped by another student, and whose mother sends her to Boston to finish junior year home-schooled by a family friend’s great-aunt. For Robin Thornton, who’s struggling with his transracial...
*STARRED REVIEW Candice Carty-Williams and Shvorne Marks are quite the dynamic duo: a debut novelist gets paired with a first-time narrator for spectacular results. Hailed (rather lazily) as the black Bridget Jones, Queenie decidedly deserves center-stage without expedient comparisons. As a Jamaican British 25-year-old Londoner, Queenie’s...
Debut novelist Maria Kuznetsova gets paired with a first-time narrator, and the collaboration is – well, ideal. Like Kuznetsova’s titular heroine Oksana, Anna Kyra Hooton is a Russian American immigrant, arriving in the U.S. at 10, three years older than 7-year-old Oksana who moves from...
*STARRED REVIEW When the material is already so funny, adding another layer of guffaw-inducements hardly seems possible, until you’ve heard Helen Ellis narrate her own 23-essay collection. Alabama-born-and-raised, Manhattan-domiciled for decades, Ellis is not wrong when she insists, “Southern accents are disarming.” Here, as in the teaser-podcast that debuted...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
