Julie Doucet is a legendary alternative comics pioneer, especially in an arena dominated by men. Her fame was further elevated by her frustrated abandonment of the industry in 2006. Her semi-autobiographical Dirty Plotte (quite the double entendre: "plotte" is Québécois slang for the c-word) began as...
Fourteen voices (each embodying a specific poetic form!) – enlivened by 14 performers – take turns bearing witness in this novel in verse. Perspectives shift among the enslavers, the enablers to such inhumanity, their victims, and their descendants, revealing decades from capture to post-Civil War...
Exceptional narrator Dominic Hoffman adroitly assumes the internationally mega-bestselling, 2020 Prix Goncourt-winning, Anglophoned latest from prodigious French author Hervé Le Tellier. Hoffman begins as professional assassin Blake, then becomes frustrated author Victor, film editor Lucie, and David, who is about to be diagnosed with terminal...
Veteran narrator Hillary Huber (soon to hit 700 credits) seems exactly in her element in embodying Hannah Lillith Assadi’s (Sonora, 2017) elegiac second novel of devolving connections, recalled through the scattering memories of an aging woman facing dementia. Once upon a time, Elle was madly in...
*STARRED REVIEW Ladee Hubbard (The Rib King) showcases the same brilliant, biting insight of her novels in an expert debut short story collection, The Last Suspicious Holdout. She builds an indelible Black community through 13 interlinked stories, mostly set in an unnamed "suburbia of the south." She...
In Woman Running in the Mountains, the late great Japanese novelist Yūko Tsushima (1947-2016) unflinchingly confronts the judgmental challenges an unwed woman faces when she defiantly chooses single motherhood. Takiko Odaka is 21 and already an independent spirit. As she goes into labor, she leaves...
*STARRED REVIEW Familiar joy is immediate as one reenters Don Lee’s signature worlds of brilliant resonance and quiet depth. In his first short story collection since his lauded Yellow debut, Lee again questions identity, unlikely relationships, and fleeting connections. “Truth was a collection of falsehoods,” Lee’s filmmaker...
*STARRED REVIEW Narrator Aidan Kelly persuasively transforms Claire Keegan’s brilliantly polished story into a gorgeous treasure. Adapting the lilting rhythms of Keegan’s Irish-accented English, Kelly utterly embodies local coal man Bill Furlong making his delivery rounds as the Christmas holiday approaches. A devoted husband and father of...
Multi-disciplinary artist and writer Vivek Shraya (The Subtweet, 2020) continues her thoughtful, deliberate self-narrations. Her latest essay collection centers change: “If I were to have anything resembling a higher purpose, I’d now say that it’s to evolve and to model evolution. To demonstrate the beauty...
Gerda Saunders, who wrote Memory’s Last Breath (2017), an exquisitely bittersweet record chronicling her experiences with dementia, is one of my most beloved friends. We have books in common, in that we find great solace and escape in the (well-)written word. Inspired by our last visit...
*STARRED REVIEW Delight sparkles throughout Sang-Keun Kim's Star Fishing, a picture book import from South Korea smoothly translated by Ginger Ly. A bunny-suit-clad child, wide awake in a shadowy bedroom, reveals, "It's the kind of night when you just can't fall asleep. You feel as though everyone...
Melissa Chadburn's electrifying debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, opens with gruesome death: "Dying hurts like f*ck-all everything." The description comes from "Aswang," a shape-shifting creature of Filipinx folklore, who knows "about the slow agonies of death" because she reanimates the body of 18-year-old Marina,...
*STARRED REVIEW Dave Eggers’ voice-of-choice Dion Graham again convincingly ciphers the author’s newest white-woman protagonist, Delaney Wells, an employee of The Circle’s (2013) Mae Holland. Here the Circle has exploded into the Every, the world’s most ubiquitous conglomerate, which continues to develop manipulative mechanisms to subtly...
Cristina Rivera Garza, one of Mexico's most important contemporary authors, is progressively gaining renown in the U.S. (where she's lived since 1989) and has won a 2020 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2020 National Book Critics Circle finalist nod in Criticism. Indie press Dorothy's release of New...
*STARRED REVIEW Mention of Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club sets this novel in 1999, when Oh San turns 23 that summer. She left her childhood village years ago, haunted by the memory of a best friendship’s wrenching cleaving. After being repeatedly abandoned by her mother,...
Award-winning Italian writer Donatella Di Pietrantonio made her English-language debut with the lauded A Girl Returned, deftly translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein (revered for her elegant Elena Ferrante translations). Author and translator return to the characters from their earlier collaboration with A Sister’s Story, another...
*STARRED REVIEW French graphic creator Fabien Toulmé opens the second of three volumes featuring Syrian refugee Hakim and his extended family with a clever recap of the first entry, facilitated by Toulmé’s young daughter, who asks to accompany him for the next interview: Toulmé lays out...
*STARRED REVIEW Lisa Yee, author of the charming and award-winning Millicent Min, Girl Genius trilogy, combines neglected U.S. history and multi-generational family legends with a thoroughly contemporary story to create the delightful and enlightening Maizy Chen's Last Chance. Three years have passed since 11-year-old Maizy saw her...
The mutable, esoteric art world is again the setting for award-winning Argentinian María Gainza’s latest, deftly translated by British writer-editor Thomas Bunstead, who also English-enabled her award-winning Optic Nerve (2019). Gainza’s narrator warns early on, “Any person reading this ought not to expect names, numbers,...
Cozy mystery label aside, Mia P. Manansala's enticing second installment of her toothsome Tita Rosie's Kitchen series opens with a warning: "I wrote Homicide and Halo-Halo while both me and my protagonist, Lila, were in rather dark places in our lives." Introduced – and nearly...
