In a house by the sea in Colombo, Sri Lanka, live two families: below are the Sinhala owners, the Rajasinghes with two daughters, Yasodhara and Lanka; upstairs are the Tamil clan of Shivalingams with their son, Shiva, twinned by a shared birthday to Yasodhara. While the...
Salmon meunière, acqua pazza, mizuna and onion salad, yellowtail teriyaki ...
*STARRED REVIEW Watanabe Yuichi sits behind bars in Japan’s infamous Fukuoka Prison. After World War II, the former “soldier-guard” is now an incarcerated “low-level war criminal” under U.S. control. His written confession, which highlights two people — “one prisoner and one guard; one poet and one...
Freshly back from the Jersey Shore, debut novelist P.S. Duffy talks about writing her first book at age 10 although she didn’t publish her first novel until she was 65, her inability to ever return to her birth country of China, and how a stranger’s...
“Define moral certainty”: The Great War in P.S. Duffy’s The Cartographer of No Man’s Land “Moral certainty.” “Righteous anger.” “God’s retribution.” The Great War implodes humanity in “No Man’s Land – a cratered landscape of ruin” in P.S. Duffy’s first novel. Published in October 2013 when Duffy was 65, The...
The late Iris Chang almost single-handedly taught the western world about the horrors of the Nanking Massacre in her 1997 The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Over six weeks that began with the Imperial Japanese Army's capture of China's then-capital city of...
The new school year has apparently already begun in certain parts of the country, including Hawai'i (which started in July!), parts of Alabama and Indiana, too. I'm sure other states, too, have begun to herd the masses back to classrooms, with the rest of the...
For the most magnificent experience, choose to go aural with a pitch-perfect quartet to narrate the four distinct stories that make up this stupendous new novel from award-winning Pam Muñoz Ryan. Then – in another reason to visit your local library often – make sure to at least...
Told in two distinct narratives by a mother and her eldest son, When the Moon Is Low follows an Afghan family's desperate journey through Turkey, Greece, Italy, and beyond, in search of safety and peace. [If you choose to go aural, Sneha Mathan (again, as always) is an ideal...
After more than two-and-a-half years since volume 13 hit Stateside shelves in December 2012, the Kurosagi quintet-plus-puppet (I mean alien) are FINALLY back. And then some. Because in this latest volume, it's Kurosagi x 3, as in three distinct Kurosagi versions fighting for page time. Guess they...
*STARRED REVIEW Before A Wild Sheep Chase made Murakami an international sensation, he wrote these “kitchen-table novels,” so named for where his composition efforts took place after he wrapped up managing his Tokyo jazz bar for the day. Both Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973...
“This man who once saved your life, he is not a bad man. Nor a good one,” a mother writes her daughter. “I have long given up on what it means exactly to be either. But I am confident now that you must know one...
Flood of Fire brings the astounding, exceptional Ibis Trilogy to a close Readers of this review will fall into two categories: (1) Those who are already two-thirds invested in the Ibis Trilogy, and (2) Newbies who might be wondering if continuing the perusal of this review...
"Well, my mama was a hairdresser, but she had this big dream that what she really wanted to be one day was a – an astronomer," 12-year-old Galileo Galilei Barnes explains to her teacher and class on her first day at her new school. Pointing at the...
In case you initially peruse this manga the Western way (flip pages from the right side to left), here's what you'll see a few pages in: "We used to fanatically watch reruns of Ultraman as kids," the creators Eiichi Shimizu and Tomohiro Shimoguchi confess. "We never dreamed...
