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...
Surely this is one of the most dramatic before-and-after reading experiences I've ever had: I read Mountains last fall when it first landed on my desk and then again just recently after I landed back from East Africa. What a difference a few thousands of miles...
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...
Trust me on this one: Debut author Glenda Armand’s Love Twelve Miles Long is THE perfect book to share today. "This was a special night," the story begins, "Mama had come to visit ...
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...
On his deathbed, Irena Sendler's father taught her the lesson that would guide her life. At age 7, she internalized his dying words: "...
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...
Nepal-born Manjushree Thapa, herself a peripatetic hybrid of East and West with an American education and Canadian ties, is one of a handful of Nepali authors successfully writing in English. This, her latest novel (and only her second in her almost two-decade writing history with seven titles...
From the genius creator of It's a Book (still my personal battle cry!) comes another delightful low-tech celebration of things that don't require electricity! "He was born a really long time ago," the tale begins, "before computers or cell phones or television." Imagine that sort...
Yu Hua is a grand master of subversion. Just as his title – China In Ten Words – promises, Yu “compress[es] the endless chatter of China today into ten simple words ...
