“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...
By the time Brandon Shimoda’s grandfather died in 1996, he had been living with Alzheimer's for almost 20 years. Shimoda was then a college freshman, which meant he had had little opportunity to know the man without the disease. Reacting to "the loss – the...
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...
A truncated version (edited for printing space) of this interview was published in the July 2019 issue of Booklist. The full interview appears below. With over 300 publishing credits, Edward Gauvin might be the hardest-working French-to-English translator ever. That tenacity has earned him major awards, including the John Dryden...
The American Dream? A Journey on Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, and the Perfect Breakfast Burrito by Shing Yin Khor Malaysia-born, LA-dwelling Shing Yin Khor introduces the “two Americas” that were their obsessions growing up: a Los Angeles “full of beautiful people and sunlight and...
*STARRED REVIEW Malaysia-born, LA-dwelling Shing Yin Khor introduces the “two Americas” that were their obsessions growing up: a Los Angeles “full of beautiful people and sunlight and open roads” where 10 years of living has also added “lots and lots and lots of traffic,” and a...
With over 300 publishing credits, Edward Gauvin might be the hardest-working French-to-English translator ever. That tenacity has earned him major awards, including the John Dryden Translation Prize (twice), and lauded NEA, PEN America, and Fulbright fellowships. His nimble skills have provided substantial attention to French graphic...
Oh, good gracious! I can’t stand it: soooo many amazing books and my aging eyeballs just can’t keep up! Last week at ALA Annual, I got to “Read ‘n’ Rave,” but I had such an embarrassingly overflowing list, the buzzer went off (uh-oh!), and I couldn’t...
In Milani’s graphic biography of the iconic Marie Curie, soon-to-be Nobel winner Ernest Rutherford explains the theory of transmutation in less than a dozen panels to Marie Curie’s “interested in science” daughter, Irène – so young, she calls it “tramputation.” That transparent accessibility repeats throughout,...
Happy final Friday of Pride Month. Wow . . . that went by quickly! I have 25 (no lie!) more books on, under, next to, and all around my desk that I will not be covering here, which is actually a good thing, because that’s proof that...
*STARRED REVIEW Fifteen years ago, Toronto-based artist Ange Zhang debuted Red Land Yellow River (2004), a gorgeous, hauntingly rendered autobiography about coming-of-age during China’s Cultural Revolution, marked by incomprehensible, chaotic, threatening change. The beloved father he introduced then becomes the subject in this book, its title a...
June is #ImmigrantHeritageMonth, which began in 2014 and has been recognized and celebrated by the (Obama) White House as “a time to celebrate diversity and immigrants’ shared American heritage” since 2015. “Immigration,” the White House declares, “is part of the DNA of this great nation.” Perhaps now more than ever...
He’s had almost two dozen names, yet his story was forgotten for 40 years. More recently, despite their violent 20th-century histories, four countries – China, Japan, and his native Korea, now cleaved into North and South – all claim him as a local hero. Perhaps best...
Two side-by-side 1840s stable houses in New York City's Greenwich Village initially boarded "the horses of the affluent." In the century-plus since, the neighborhood welcomed immigrants from around the world, and matured into "the creative center of New York City." In 1930, the double buildings...
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...
Organized by the Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month, in April, has been celebrated annually since 1996. While reading, writing, even performing poetry should be a year-round activity, National Poetry Month is a welcome catalyst to get verse newbies and doubters interested and involved. In...
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,...
Malaka Gharib’s Catholic mother regretted leaving her upper-middle-class Manila life, but unrest fueled by the 1970s Marcos regime sent her stateside. Meanwhile, her Egyptian Muslim father “had been scheming to get to America since high school” and finally enrolled at UCLA’s School of Management. They...
Every day she didn’t tell, Grace Talusan thought she was saving her grandfather’s life. “There was a daytime grandfather and a nighttime grandfather, two different people in the same body.” Talusan was 7 when that nocturnal monster began the sexual assaults, which spanned seven years....
The “largest mass slaughter of Asians on the American continent” claimed the lives of over 300 Chinese immigrants in May 1911 in Torreón, in the Mexican state of Coahuila. Despite its magnitude, the massacre remains a “buried episode,” obscured by substantial erroneous coverage, that writer,...
