Sometimes, pushing "stop" before a book's end might be the best course of action. Seasoned reader Sneha Mathan provides her usual nuanced, affecting narration throughout the 14 hours here, yet even her resonating performance can't prevent the frustration of a stupendous story that veers fatally...
Novelist and physicist Alan Lightman (Einstein's Dreams) has traveled twice yearly since 2003 to Cambodia to work with his Harpswell Foundation which empowers women leaders in Cambodia and Southeast Asia. In his first novel in seven years, Lightman’s opening dedication directly spotlights Harpswell’s “strong and...
Audiobooks hold a distinct place in the sports and fitness book realm – they’re the only ones you can read while exercising. The authors of “Holding The Hunger Games Hostage at the Gym” (Management Science, 2014) cite research proving that listening to audiobooks can actually...
*STARRED REVIEW In her September 16, 2019, cover article for Time magazine, Atwood recalls informing the showrunner for the Emmy-winning Hulu adaptation of her iconic The Handmaid’s Tale, “You absolutely cannot kill Aunt Lydia, or I will have your head on a plate.” Aunt Lydia, it...
By 2142, “generations of interracial partnerships from the twenty-first century onward [have] rendered [names] meaningless” as markers of ethnicity. Time-traveling Agent Kin is named after quinoa; his fellow agent Markus Fernandez is a pale Brit/northern Californian. Author Mike Chen is Chinese American and channels Idris Elba...
*STARRED REVIEW Papa is an elderly creature of habit: every day begins with a cup of tea, tending to his plants, tidying up, and getting dressed to ride the bus into town. His regular walk takes him by familiar stores and lands him at the same...
Slightly gravelly voiced Scottish actor Euan Morton takes immediate command here, crisply enunciating Bangkok-native, New-York based Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s ambitious debut. What initially reads like unrelated short stories reveals a broader overview of a city in constant flux, its past, present, and future represented by a...
C’mon: grab that headset, hit play, get out, and let Antonia Malchik and Eliza Foss convince you why you should be walking. Foss is an ideally persuasive companion to journalist Malchik, whose debut title proves how “walking is essential to our physical health and creativity,...
As co-founding (with Dave Eggers) executive director of the human rights and oral history organization, Voice of Witness, Mimi Lok channels her intimate observation of human relationships into an astute first story collection. The titular story features a dual narrative of extreme circumstances as experienced...
*STARRED REVIEW For “speaking a few innocuous words on a television program in the aftermath of the failed 2016 “coup” against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Ahmet Altan was sentenced to life imprisonment, recounts his friend and lawyer Philippe Sands in his foreword to this book....
*STARRED REVIEW Jokha Altharthi makes literary history as the first female Omani author to be translated into English and as author of the first novel written in Arabic to win the Man Booker International Prize. She shares that extraordinary success with translator and Oxford professor Marilyn...
Martha Wilson, a U.S. expat who has lived in Canada for more than two decades, adroitly balances characters from both sides of the shared border (and beyond) throughout her exceptional debut of 16 short stories, Nosy White Woman. While first collections might often prove uneven,...
As McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers’ default narrator-of-choice for over a dozen titles, Dion Graham improves – again – Eggers’ original with his meticulous, mellifluous aural presentation. Eggers’ latest is a slim, tense title that, on the page, might read more didactic parable than affecting novel. Anonymity...
When violent unrest arrives in Syria, Jude’s family is cleaved in half as she and her pregnant mother leave behind her father and older brother to live with her uncle’s family in Ohio. Jude perseveres with English, an unfamiliar (sometimes unwelcoming) culture, establishing new friendships,...
Justine Eyre takes a voyage around and through the world, voicing three centuries of enigmatic, peripatetic characters in Pola Oloixarac’s genre-defying latest. Divided into three distinct sections, the epic – a mere five hours in duration but dense as multi-layered allegory – opens in the...
The one thing in life that’s guaranteed is, well, death. But books are certainly a lasting legacy. And sometimes, when we get the books after their creator has passed on, an audiobook can breathe new life into the text, animating from beyond. A bittersweet legacy, indeed, but...
*STARRED REVIEW In 2014, a quarter-century after the 1988 death of filmmaker/playwright/writer/activist Kathleen Collins at 46 of breast cancer, indie distributor Milestone Films reintroduced her groundbreaking 1982 movie, Losing Ground, one of the first films written and directed by an African American woman, inspiring new interest in the...
*STARRED REVIEW When Anthony Shadid’s own nuclear family falls apart – his marriage ends, he’s separated from his only child – he returns to Marjayoun, Lebanon in August, 2007 with “foolish and rash ...
Best known for her canonic, autobiographical short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and her nonfiction declaration, Women and Economics, Charlotte Perkins Gilman remains one of history’s greatest feminists. Written in 1915, Herland was initially serialized in Gilman’s own magazine, The Forerunner, but didn’t appear in book-form until 1979. That she...
“I am making dying bearable for myself,” Cory Taylor reveals in her final book, originally published in her native Australia just months after she passed away in 2016 from melanoma-related brain cancer at 61. A euthanasia drug she bought online allowed Taylor some semblance of...
