Allow me to start with two immediate thoughts about content and delivery. Content: Today's Mexican narcos, the Colombian cartels, the Afghan/Pakistani smuggling rings utterly pale in comparison to the British and American opium runners demanding access to 19th-century China. You might have studied the distant...
Celebrate the lunar Year of the Water Dragon with Ying Chang Compestine's latest picture book which reminds us all again (gently and poignantly) about the value of patience and perseverance (especially relevant in this Dragon year!), the wisdom of elders, and the importance of cultural connections. Ming...
More and more, I've noticed book cover flaps yielding important tidbits (which makes me a bit concerned about such covers going astray, especially for picture books handled by so many little hands!). But worry aside, how fitting to find this on the front flap about...
"Dear Mr. Jean Paul Sartre, I know that you are dead and old and also a philosopher. So, on an obvious level, you and I do not have a lot in common." Thus begins 15-year-old Tina's class project for her English Honors elective on existential...
Food writer Ramin Ganeshram shares her Indo-Caribbean culinary prowess in her debut title for younger readers about eighth-grader Anjali Krishnan who really knows how to stir things up ...
Few Nepali writers have thus far landed on western bookshelves, with only two exceptions who come immediately to mind – elegant Samrat Upadhyay (Arresting God in Kathmandu, The Royal Ghosts) and activist Manjushree Thapa (The Tutor of History, Seasons of Flight). So to find another Nepali author writing in English is a...
An aborted suicide is probably not the most solid basis from which to start a lasting friendship ...
Even though today's calendar reminds you it's Friday the 13th, no worries! Let me share with you the youthful wisdom of one Grace Pacy Lin: "There was no day dumplings couldn't make better." After a long-awaited four-year hiatus, Pacy's back ...
The ongoing gender-bender adventures of Nitori Shuichi – a boy who wants to be a girl – and his best friend Takatsuki Yoshino – a girl who wants to be a boy – open with the beginning of the 6th-grade school year. What commenced as mostly cross-dressing fun in volume...
Maaza Mengiste's voice, delivered by telephone many thousands of miles away, sounds impossibly young and happy. She’s easy to talk to, easy to laugh with. She’s in Rome for another few months, enjoying the spring sun, sipping another cup of tea in a nearby café,...
Chapter 1: an ultra high-tech building with an especially remarkable elevator (although without the usual, mundane details like floor buttons), loose change that suddenly doesn't add up, a beautiful (chubby) young woman in everything pink who might have said "Proust" (or maybe "Truest? ...
The first sentence of Tsitsi Dangarembga's semi-autobiographical novel sets a haunting tone: "I was not sorry when my brother died." With his death, 13-year-old Tambu is presented with a profound opportunity: even though she's a girl, as the now-eldest child in her poor village family...
What does it take to update a 60+-year-old story? In the case of Usamaru Furuya's 21st-century manga adaptation of the literary classic Ningen Shikkaku, a semi-autobiographical novel by Dazai Osamu (published in 1948 in Japan, translated into English as No Longer Human in 1958), an...
Get to know these characters well – they will surely prove to be worth every page of their three-book investment: Deeti, the young wife of a detached opium addict whose startling grey eyes see well beyond her vision; Zachary Reid, a mixed-race freeman from Baltimore...
Here's a moment of literary serendipity: on the morning my Bookslut interview with Luis Alberto Urrea went up, I happened to be finishing the galley of Thrity Umrigar’s latest novel, The World We Found. Amazingly, here's what appears in the penultimate paragraph on the very...
Well, FINALLY, it's my turn! The rest of the family got their Rabbit, Tiger, and Rat editions over the last few years ...
Canadian author Deborah Ellis has harnessed the power of words to create miraculous results: her multi-award-winning Breadwinner Trilogy (The Breadwinner, Parvana's Journey, and Mud City) has raised over a million dollars in royalties for Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan and Street Kid International. With her...
When Firdous Bamji – a veteran narrator – reads Amitav Ghosh’s haunting novel in his 'normal' voice, he's hardly memorable. But as soon as he 'becomes' the searching Piya, the sophisticated Kanai ("'[s]ay it to rhyme with Hawaii'"), the contemplative Nirmal, the grounded Nilima, and the many, many...
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 ...
I know it says "Afterword" for a reason, but sometimes starting from the back of a book (must be an Asian thing!) feels just right. In this latest title from British author/screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce (Millions – which was also a pretty good film – and Framed), the...
