*STARRED REVIEW Mac Barnett (Paolo, Emperor of Rome), lauded author of dozens of titles, poses a timeless question that has no absolute response in What Is Love?, a poignant, often humorous exploration of one of life's most personal experiences. "When I was a boy," Barnett's story begins,...
*STARRED REVIEW The fraught relationship between two half-sisters links the 14 stories of Amy Neswald's exceptional debut collection, I Know You Love Me, Too. Ingrid and Kate, eight years apart, share a father who died when Ingrid was 20 and Kate 12. "Relationships between half-sisters should be half...
At 13, Anamaria is a beloved daughter, a top-performing student at an elite academy. But she lives in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico on the Texas border in 1999, threatened by looming femicide. And then Anamaria meets Thirty, who insists she’s Anamaria’s 17-years-in-the-future self. Thirty indeed talks...
Among countless Pride and Prejudice adaptations, Eden Appiah-Kubi’s debut might be the only with a transgender co-lead; it certainly has one of the most non-traditional Jane Austen-inspired casts ever. Welcome to Bennet House, Longbourn College’s first and only female residence. Appiah-Kubi’s Bennet sisters here are Black engineering...
Sonali Dev continues to channel Jane Austen via the Raje family with her third in the series, familiarly, gratefully voiced by Indian American favorite Soneela Nankani. Dev opens with a literal bang: California gubernatorial candidate Yash Raje is shot during a rally. His physical recovery...
Complicated intergenerational relationships have long fueled fiction, with immigration notably adding further challenges to parent-child understanding and bonding. Weike Wang’s provocative sophomore novel (after Chemistry, 2017) again centers on an accomplished Chinese American Harvard graduate with uneasy social, professional, and familial connections. Here Wang dissects the...
At just 128 pages, Maud Casey's compelling City of Incurable Women – ostensibly a historical novel featuring 19th-century French women institutionalized with diagnoses of hysteria – might invite an expeditious single-sitting read. That sparseness obscures its intricate density: hardly straightforward narrative, City of Incurable Women is a...
*STARRED REVIEW Award-winning, bestselling Julie Otsuka is averaging one book per decade, making each exquisite title exponentially more precious. Here she creates a stupendous collage of small moments that results in an extraordinary examination of the fragility of quotidian human relationships. Initially set in an underground pool, it voices...
Dream Street by cousins Tricia Elam Walker (Nana Akua Goes to School) and Ekua Holmes (Voice of Freedom; Saving American Beach) is a formidable, potent antidote to a world that is often unkind to children, especially children of color. Here, "the children who live and play on...
"Objects just seem to collect me, of their own volition," insists Haruki Murakami (First Person Singular): LPs, books, magazine clippings, pencil stubs, and, of course, T-shirts. Murakami T might detour from his global bestsellers, but it's a delightful glimpse into iconic Murakami through his casual...
Award-winning Canadian cartoonist Philippe Girard (Obituary Man) admirably condenses seven decades into a concise 120 pages in Leonard Cohen: On a Wire. It's a valuable introduction to the tumultuous life of the iconic singer/songwriter/poet perhaps best remembered for his classic "Hallelujah," eventually covered by some...
Perumal Murugan and Aniruddhan Vasudevan reunite after the infamous “success” of Murugan’s translated-into-English debut, One Part Woman, longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature. Murugan declared himself dead on Facebook after the cult novel was viciously condemned in India, his homeland, and...
Making her dual print and audio debut, journalist Kat Chow relies on words to resurrect her late mother – and lost family, by extension – who died of cancer in 2004. Not yet 50, her mother seemed to fulfill the superstition that the women in...
Few titles need official CIA permission to be published, but Sophia Glock's perceptive graphic novel memoir, Passport, had to go through the "daunting and complicated task" of obtaining the CIA's Publication Review Board approval. Glock's parents were "intelligence officers," an admission they disclosed when they...
*STARRED REVIEW Fourteen exquisite, interlinked stories, set mostly in Washington, D.C., comprise Leslie Pietrzyk's shrewd Admit This to No One. Pietrzyk (Silver Girl) humanizes Beltway insiders (and wannabe outsiders), even as she skewers their hypocrisies, weaknesses, and dreams. In a city where "so, what do you...
Graphic titles about Quakers aren't exactly a hot topic – or are they? This season brings two Quaker-related comics in quick succession: David Lester's Prophet Against Slavery: Benjamin Lay and this, Dash Shaw's Discipline, a haunting fictionalization of a teenage Quaker Civil War soldier. Quakers...
*STARRED REVIEW In 2019, Pulitzer Prize–winning, MacArthur “Genius” Nikole Hannah-Jones “made a simple pitch” for a special issue of The New York Times Magazine to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the August 1619 arrival of the White Lion, the ship which carried the first captive Africans...
Nominated seven times for the Nobel Prize in Literature before his 1965 death at 79, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (In Black and White, 2018) remains one of Japan’s most important modern writers. These three stories date back a century, yet their universal theme, familial relationships, remains relevantly...
No one knows what happened to the Ark of the Covenant, the legendary vessel holding Moses' engraved Ten Commandments, but "archeologists, mystics, and adventurers still seek for it in vain," explains Eisner-winning comics creator Rutu Modan in an introductory note to her intriguing graphic title...
In the 15 years since his 2006 graphic book debut with the award-winning Night Fisher, R. Kikuo Johnson's titles have been precious few even as his detailed art becomes increasingly recognizable on New Yorker covers. His third book, No One Else, might seem spare at...
