Nine of the 10 stories in The Islands, the deeply satisfying first collection of short fiction from University of Notre Dame professor Dionne Irving (Quint), center women who share a Jamaican background. The plurality inherent in the title cleverly points to Jamaica but also England...
Beyond the countless corpses, Japanese manga auteur Junji Ito’s latest import deftly – and, of course, ever so gruesomely – highlights the liminal spaces between life and death, good and evil, waking and sleep. An engaged couple’s innocent decision to “stop somewhere on a whim” during...
Oto Toda’s first manga collection translated into English presents four short stories and seven “two-page manga” that range from poignant to gruesome, whimsical to surreal. The titular “To Strip the Flesh” is the most developed, about a YouTube star who butchers freshly-shot game on camera....
In the third installment of the internationally best-selling Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, some of the familiar crew from Tokyo’s Café Funiculi Funicula move to Hakodate’s Café Donna Donna on Hokkaido after its proprietor, Yukari Tokita, leaves indefinitely for the U.S. to help a young...
Multiple shes and cats populate this gratifying, slim novel-in-stories, which arrives with a decades-long history that undoubtedly underscores its timeless appeal. Makoto Shinkai launched his career as one of Japan’s most lauded animation and manga artists with the five-minute film, She and Her Cat (1999), later expanded...
*STARRED REVIEW Among the perennially relevant, permanently indisputable pioneers of the graphic genre is Art Spiegelman, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus remains a groundbreaking masterpiece. The provenance for that achievement is a 1972 three-page strip, included in this celebrated historical compilation, which was first published in 1978...
*STARRED REVIEW Six of the eight stories in Ling Ma's debut short story collection, Bliss Montage, have already appeared in the usual prestigious publications (the New Yorker, Granta, the Atlantic). "They can just read them for free somewhere else?" a skeptical mother remarks to her about-to-be-published daughter over lunch in...
*STARRED REVIEW Considered one of Korea’s greatest novelists, Pak Kyongni (1926-2008) is revered for her multi-volume epic Toji (The Land, 1969-1994), designated among the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. She began publishing autobiographical short stories, inspired by tragic post-Korean War experiences, exposing the high cost of survival,...
*STARRED REVIEW While novels told from an animal’s point of view are that unusual, an entire story collection with non-human narrators seems rare. Even more striking is the stupendous quality of Talia Lakshmi Kolluri’s breathtaking debut. Deep bonds define Kolluri’s heart-pulling protagonists, who too often face...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, Banana Yoshimoto (born 1964) debuted as one of Japan’s youngest literary phenoms. In the decades since, she continues to produce brilliantly relevant fiction, notable for an open, accessible simplicity that belies revelatory observations about life, love, happiness, and more. Her latest...
The nearly 15 years Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi spent writing and rewriting proves to be tenacity well invested, resulting in her audacious debut, Jollof Rice and Other Revolutions: A Novel in Interlocking Stories. The 10 chapters here work as standalone pieces (many were previously published in...
In her newest story collection, May-lee Chai (Useful Phrases for Immigrants, 2018) shifts dexterously between the personal and the fantastical. Four of the eight stories feature autobiographical stand-ins who are, like Chai, the daughter of a Chinese father and white mother whose formative years are defined...
From the particular to the universal: Cross-cultural stories A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times by Ethiopian American writer Meron Hadero highlights immigrant stories of dislocation and identity. Displacement – often by outside force, rarely by personal choice – haunts Meron Hadero’s superb debut short story...
*STARRED REVIEW Following her extraordinary novel Little Gods (2020), Meng Jin presents a fascinating 10-story collection divided into four sections. One-line drawings of profiles interrupt, switching directions as if cleverly reminding readers to shift perspectives. Death haunts the first three titles. In “Philip Is Dead,” the narrator insistently...
*STARRED REVIEW Once more, internationally bestselling Sayaka Murata confronts unspeakable topics with quotidian calm, shockingly convincing logic, and creepy humor in a dozen genre-defying stories, translated again by her chosen, Japanese-to-English enabler, Ginny Tapley Takemori. Death is no longer an ending, full stop, in “A First-Rate Material,”...
*STARRED REVIEW Relationships between women – familial, beloved, strange, imagined – dominate queer Taiwanese American K-Ming Chang’s (Bestiary, 2020) explosive and bizarre first story collection. Three single-word, deftly exacting descriptors define three sections – “Mothers,” “Myths,” “Moths” – which organize 16 tales that challenge immigration and...
Family Album, from award-winning author Gabriela Alemán, is a shrewd, beguiling collection. In eight genre-defying stories, the Brazil-born, Ecuador-based Alemán deftly confronts push-button topics like colonialism, identity, and religion. Dick Cluster, who translated Alemán's novel Poso Wells (2018), returns here with Mary Ellen Fieweger to provide...
The dozen stories of Morgan Talty's vivid debut collection, Night of the Living Rez, certainly stand alone – eight of them were previously published in various prestigious journals including the Georgia Review and Narrative magazine, which also awarded him a 2021 Narrative Prize. To discover all 12...
Short-story collections can be uneven, but readers will be consistently impressed by these extraordinary, resonant, and exhilarating debuts by a dozen diverse writers. Afterparties. By Anthony Veasna So. 2021. Ecco. So’s nine electrifying stories magnificently create an interconnected Cambodian American community. So’s death in December 2020 at just...
*STARRED REVIEW In addition to 11 novels, Novel Prize-winning Toni Morrison wrote this “one and only short story” in 1980, collected in 1983’s Confirmation: An Anthology of African American Women, edited by Amiri and Amina Baraka. Posthumously published as a standalone volume, the story is paired...
