Even before the title page, we've got a country road, an ambling rooster and a barreling semi – this can't end well ...
*STARRED REVIEW Ray Fawkes's One Soul debuted in 2011, earning extensive adulation (including an Eisner nomination) for its never-before-done graphic presentation of 18 lives via 18-panel grids divided across two-page spreads. His 2014 follow-up, The People Inside, used a similar format to follow 24 individuals through various relationships. One...
Lauren Groff has built a significant career crafting novels and stories featuring sharp observations by and about modern women. In a surprising feat of time travel, the two-time National Book Award finalist (for Fates and Furies and Florida) leaps back to 12th-century England in Matrix and fictionalizes the life...
*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...
*STARRED REVIEW Mariana Enriquez’s second collection, after 2017’s Things We Lost in the Fire, is insatiably addicting even as the dozen stories are gruesome, lurid, and utterly weird. As a Buenos Aires journalist, she witnessed true horror, the consequences of dictatorship, corruption, 30,000 disappeared; her literary...
Suzanne Park (Loathe at First Sight) crafts another engaging enemies-to-lovers romance in So We Meet Again. Back in junior high, Jessie Kim and Daniel Choi were pitted against each other by their competitive Korean American parents as beacons of near-perfection. Both eventually escaped: Jess landed on...
Time, geographies, and backgrounds all seem to flow effortlessly through Jai Chakrabarti's exquisite debut novel, A Play for the End of the World. At its core is the provenance of a possible love story between two strangers in New York City. Interwoven into this uncertain...
*STARRED REVIEW Prodigious author, journalist, and translator Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Reputations, 2016), one of South America’s most important writers, is once again deftly translated by award-winning Canadian Anne McLean. Four stories provokingly manipulate time. In “Woman on the Riverbank,” a war photographer briefly encounters a politician’s assistant...
The men, mostly young, in memoirist and playwright Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s provoking second story collection lack fulfillment. “Workplace lassitude” is suffocating a 19-year-old wannabe actor stuck at his father’s construction company in “Audition,” while an art-gallery employee fights nine hours of daily tedium in “A, S,...
*STARRED REVIEW The characters in Yoon Choi’s stories are caught in-between cultures, families, generations, even life and death. Especially stupendous are her Korean immigrant women-in-flux. In “The Church of Abundant Life,” a childless woman recalls how she met her husband through her English tutor in Korea...
Patricia Lockwood, who shocked and/or delighted with her memoir, Priestdaddy (2017), continues to disquiet with her new sort-of-in-the-end tragic (but uplifting, too) family drama. Kristen Sieh might be her ideal accomplice, as she oh-so-comfortably ciphers zingers and wisecracks most readers probably never expected to hear,...
Award-winning British children's author/illustrator Lizzy Stewart makes an impressive adult graphic debut with interlinked short episodes observing, analyzing and celebrating women's friendships. The nine chapters in It's Not What You Thought It Would Be could each stand alone, but Stewart cleverly relies on shades of orange to...
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:...
Duane Murray, an actor, writer, and producer in film, makes his on-the-page graphic debut, nimbly realized by Canadian artist Shawn Daley. In a rallying example of the axiom “It takes a village,” a half-dozen graphic greats – including Jeff Lemire and Nate Powell – contribute...
The intimate struggles of a husband and wife desperate to become parents might not be universal literary fare, but with millions of couples worldwide attempting conception via IVF, Two-Week Wait will surely, deservedly find sympathetic audiences. Luke C. Jackson and Kelly Jackson "began their own IVF...
*STARRED REVIEW The Seoul subway system's line #2 is a circular route that's also the city's busiest; it happens to include Gangnam – as in "Gangnam Style" – among its dozens of popular stations. Author/illustrator Kim Hyo-eun's magnificent I Am the Subway highlights a train traveling...
*STARRED REVIEW Nine electrifying stories comprise Anthony Veasna So’s debut, and while many were previously published, when read together their magnificence is enhanced as they create an interconnected Cambodian American community. Most autobiographical is “Human Development,” in which the narrator is also Anthony, a gay, Stanford-degreed...
James Sie (Still Life Las Vegas) multitasks as author and partial narrator in his first YA novel: the theme might seem common – a high school love story complicated by parents and friends – but the narrative’s specifics elevate the familiar into memorable. Sie gamely...
Next-door neighbors Cora Hamed and Quinn McCauley’s best-friendship began in toddlerhood, but they’ve spent the last 10 months in silence. Cora’s sister Mabel is dead. Quinn’s brother Parker murdered her; he took a gun to school and killed four people, including himself. Mourning defines the Hamed...
