Adam Stern began his Harvard career feeling like an impostor when he was matched into a Harvard Medical School psychiatry residency impeded, he worried, by his upstate-New York medical degree: “I found myself soaring into one of the most prestigious residency programs in the country,...
*STARRED REVIEW Benjamin Lay, small in stature with dwarfism, was a monumental historical figure almost lost until historian Marcus Rediker published The Fearless Benjamin Lay (2017), which returned Lay to prominence as "the first revolutionary abolitionist." Canadian artist David Lester energetically distills Rediker's biography into a...
What began as a series by journalist Masuma Ahuja for The Lily (a product of the Washington Post) expands here into the enlightening Girlhood. Ahuja gathers "colorful and rich" accounts of 30 girls from 27 countries that reveal similar themes: longing for adventures, big dreams, growing pains, and figuring...
Young People's Poet Laureate Margarita Engle (Your Heart, My Sky) masterfully blends inspiring symbolism with sobering reality in Light for All, a picture book that both celebrates and exposes the hardships of the immigrant experience. Pura Belpré Award-winning illustrator Raúl Colón (Imagine!) splendidly fills the pages with...
Journalist Danielle Dreilinger resurrects, elevates, and applauds the superwoman, subversive history of “home economics,” a field now more unjustly lampooned than deservedly lauded. Dreilinger’s preface, “Everything You Know about Home Economics Is Wrong,” promises – and veteran narrator Rachel Perry splendidly delivers – 150 years...
Make room for African Artists: From 1882 to Now, a stunning coffee-table title that is itself a substantial, gorgeous display. Conceived by internationally renowned art publisher Phaidon, this impressive compilation showcases 316 modern and contemporary artists who "were either born within the continent or have...
*STARRED REVIEW Best known as a mega award-winning playwright, Sarah Ruhl (44 Poems for You, 2020) is also a MacArthur “Genius,” Yale professor, poet, and author. Her memoir is an utter gift – no superlatives are enough; no review can communicate its resonating efficacy. Just after Ruhl...
*STARRED REVIEW French graphic creator Fabien Toulmé transforms “the words that were entrusted“ to him into this stupendous testimony of survival. The first of three volumes (the subsequent two have published in France and are scheduled to be published in the U.S. in 2022) begins with...
*STARRED REVIEW Rare is the audiobook that remains infectiously delightful through the ending credits, but Helen Ellis won’t disappoint with the 13 essays – her acknowledgements could almost qualify for a 14th, they’re that entertaining – of her second collection. Her beloved husband of 25 years...
*STARRED REVIEW The expectation of consistent quality among 36 global voices seems daunting, but editor Sofija Stefanovic admirably achieves this in a majority of these stories. Alien Nation: 36 True Tales of Immigration began on "one of the best-known stages of New York City" – the "plush...
Just as only Akwaeke Emezi could have narrated their Freshwater debut, no other voice could have manifested their first nonfiction title. Presented as an epistolary mosaic addressed to family, friends, lovers, betrayers, and heroes, Emezi’s raw voice lays bare their unadorned writing. Although the vulnerability, arrogance, and...
In 1993, 3-year-old Ly Tran arrived in Queens with her parents and three older brothers from South Vietnam. Their new apartment was not the nhà là – “a house made of sticks and dried leaves” – that had been their former home; stability, however, was...
That Jo Koy has created a sold-out, standing-ovation-earning stand-up career making people laugh while mining intimate family stories means no one else could possibly narrate his memoir. His hard-earned superstardom translates seamlessly into an audiobook, giving him a double-debut credit as author and narrator, presenting...
Kei Miller: Many Different Writers Kei Miller commands genres – poetry, fiction, essays – as adroitly as he navigates identities as a Jamaican native son, a British academic, a global award-winning writer, and, most recently, a Miami professor. As poet, he's been shortlisted for the Costa...
Literary chameleon Kei Miller (The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion) has produced award-winning short stories, novels, poetry, and essays. Things I Have Withheld is arguably his most stupendous title to date. These 14 exquisitely vulnerable essays explore his Jamaican heritage, his British...
*STARRED REVIEW Michelle Zauner’s mother Chongmi died in 2014 – she was just 56, Zauner 25. Her grief inspired her first album as Japanese Breakfast in 2016. Her viral 2018 New Yorker essay, “Crying in H Mart,” morphed into the first chapter of this, her dual author/narrator...
Sociology scholar Anna Malaika Tubbs double debuts as author and narrator in her empowering examination of three mothers: Alberta King, Berdis Baldwin, and Louise Little, who “have been almost entirely ignored throughout history,” although their sons are renowned: Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, and...
For most of her first seven years, Anna Qu was "the girl without parents; a father dead, a mother who left to start a new life." And yet those years held the "love" Qu names in the subtitle of her bittersweet debut, Made in China:...
*STARRED REVIEW When Kristen Radtke (Imagine Wanting Only This) began writing Seek You in 2016, the world was rather different. "Loneliness is one of the most universal things any person can feel," her author's note posits, but still-looming, pandemic-mandated isolation imbues her spectacular graphic memoir with...
Renowned for his international travelogues – Pyongyang; Shenzhen; Jerusalem – Guy Delisle now mines his adolescence for a magnetic Factory Summers. Before he became an award-winning graphic auteur, Delisle at 16 worked in a Quebec City pulp and paper mill where his father was an...
