Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt certainly seems to be an ideal choice to narrate a labyrinthine, multigenerational mystery tied to a posh British countryside home, Birchwood Manor. “And I? I had no choice; I stayed behind,” Froggatt crisply assures Birchwood’s only permanent ghostly resident, who ends...
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi “That whole thing about fiction not being the truth is a lie,” one character admonishes another in Susan Choi’s fifth (and finest) novel. Returning to the multilayered teacher-student power struggles that were seared into My Education (2013), Trust Exercise immediately puts...
Revered writer of dozens of novels, plays, short stories, and essays, Yukio Mishima was an iconic master of the performative existence. A literary sensation by 24 for Confessions of a Mask (1949), a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman about a young homosexual’s hidden identity, fame would be Mishima’s...
Born to a Cairo-based merchant father, raised by his paternal grandmother in Nablus, educated in a Constantinople boarding school, Midhat Kamal is already a peripatetic polyglot when he arrives in France. While he studies medicine at the University of Montpellier, he lives with a doctor...
Prodigious Joyce Carol Oates’ latest novel reads rather like a mash-up of The Hunger Games, The Handmaid’s Tale, even A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In 2039, in the Reconstituted North American States, 17-year-old Adriane Strohl is “the spiky-haired girl with the big glistening...
"When Aidan was born, everyone thought he was a girl." But his name, his room, his clothes just didn't fit. Aidan realized "he was really another kind of boy. It was hard to tell his parents what he knew about himself, it was even harder...
*STARRED REVIEW Once upon a time, they were “that happy family”: two parents, two children, one dog, living in “the house of [their] dreams.” And then they added a coastal apartment and a mountain escape – traversed via luxury car, then adventure mobile – and then...
The luggage is loaded, and the gas tank is full. Destination’s mapped. Ready to go? Press play! MIDDLE GRADE Flying Lessons and Other Stories edited by Ellen Oh, read by full cast Some of the most beloved, lauded, and awarded children’s authors – including Matt de la Peña,...
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....
It's the first day of school again, and Emoni Santiago tells her young daughter Emma, more commonly called Babygirl, "make sure you're nice to the other kids and ...
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,...
*STARRED REVIEW Joining a growing cohort of notable Korean imports, Ha Seong-nan’s dazzling, vaguely intertwined collection of 10 stories is poised for Western acclaim. In “Flowers of Doom,” a loner painstakingly studies his neighbors by sifting through their trash – “Garbage never lies” – eventually deciphering...
James Anderson Foster narrates 13 of 15 stories in Slouka’s newest collection, his second in two decades after his 1998 short-fiction debut, Lost Lake. Fathers and sons, husbands and wives, sons and mothers, men and animals figure prominently here. Foster effortlessly embodies these diverse characters,...
Yukiko Motoya – who’s won major literary awards in her native Japan – makes her English-language debut (Anglophone-enabled by Asa Yoneda) with a label-defying, eyebrow-raising, beguilingly entertaining collection. Six narrators – Natalie Naudus, Brian Nishii, Erin Bennett, Paul Michael Garcia, Tanya Eby, and Kate Mulligan...
Readymade Bodhisattva: The Kaya Anthology of South Korean Science Fiction, edited by Sunyoung Park and Sang Joon Park Tenacious indie nonprofit Kaya Press launches its Magpie Series (which showcases Korean titles in translation that encapsulate “a reflexive picture of Korea and the breakneck speed of its...
*STARRED REVIEW Science fiction in Korea is relatively new, initially imported from the West via early-20th-century translations. By the late-1950s, the rapid modernization of postwar South Korea proffered considerable fodder for sf-writer wannabes. Over the following decades, Korea’s ongoing political, socioeconomic, and technological reinventions created fertile...
Because she was the seventh daughter, Princess Bari – whose name means “abandoned” – was discarded as a baby only to return in triumph to save the world. Like her mythic Korean namesake, Bari is the unwanted seventh girl in a house desperate for sons....
Constant corporeal manifestations aren't mandatory for certain souls in David Levithan’s Every Day series: waking up in someone else's body is 'normal' for some. A and X are two such wanderers, albeit with diverging agendas: A's a respectful temporary visitor, X a parasitic usurper. Rhiannon...
In Robin Miles’s rich, rhythmic narration, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s (I Do Not Come to You By Chance) latest – written in chapters that are sometimes just a few lines – sounds like verse poetry. The story is hardly soothing, based on interviews with 2014 Boko...
