Being part of a Jewish and South Asian Indian family surely has delicious perks: "Making Indian food that my mom ate as a kid for a Jewish holiday that my dad grew up with – that was a lucky combination." For the first-night-of-Hanukkah meal, a...
"The language of war turns the other into an object – the language of literature humanizes,” writes Laren McClung in her introduction to a collection featuring 61 contributors (and five translators) – 62 counting Yusef Komunyakaa’s resonating preface – each intimately affected by the Vietnam...
President Obama’s historic December 17, 2014 order to “normalize relations” between the United States and Cuba began the restoration of diplomacy after more than half a century of hostile restrictions. His 72-hour visit to Havana in March 2016 – the first made by a sitting...
*STARRED REVIEW On November 4, 2013, two students on their way home overlap by eight minutes while riding the 57 bus across Oakland, Calif. Sasha, a private school senior, has Asperger's syndrome, was assigned male at birth, identifies as agender (neither male nor female), uses the...
*STARRED REVIEW Although Jenny Diski is renowned across the pond, her defiant treatise against her terminal cancer, In Gratitude, published just before her 2016 death is, ironically, what earned her substantial stateside acclaim. Now available posthumously to U.S. readers is her spectacular 1995 collection of bizarre-to-rueful-to-stunning stories, bookended by...
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. White Teeth by Zadie Smith. What do these novels have in common? All were debuts, and all earned coveted awards, plaudits, and significant sales numbers. For those of you watching the prize and bestseller...
*STARRED REVIEW For those unfamiliar with "golden shovel" poems, here's how they work: choose an existing poem, then create a new poem by ending each line with the exact words, in order, of the original poem. Here, Coretta Scott King Award winner Nikki Grimes opens with Psalm...
*STARRED REVIEW The five "narrative parts" of this work, designated only with Roman numerals, comprise five styles: short story; first-person, faux memoir; folktale of sorts; 10-parts-plus-epilogue novella; and no-punctuation vignette. The connections require attention, with results well worth the reader's intriguing participation. An Indian American professor's tragedy-ensuing...
Columbia undergrads Lucy and Gabe meet in a Shakespeare seminar – on 9/11. Their class – including the professor who glibly asks if the pilot was drunk when his TA announces the first tower crash – is as yet unaware of the devastating reverberations to...
*STARRED REVIEW Samantha Schweblin, who is Buenos Aires-born and now lives in Berlin, makes her English-language novel debut, thanks to McDowell's crisp translation. Worms, migrating souls, unseen toxins, and deformed children punctuate a mysterious dialog between Amanda, a dying woman in an emergency clinic, and David,...
*STARRED REVIEW Internationally lauded for historical novels (Girl with a Pearl Earring), Tracy Chevalier takes a surprising narrative path as she returns over the Pond to her capital birth-city (she’s been British-domiciled for decades) with the Bard in tow: Chevalier’s privileged fifth graders play out Othello...
Café Leila & Beautiful Ruins: Q&A with Donia Bijan “Strange things happened when I returned to Tehran in 2010 after thirty-two years in exile,” writes Donia Bijan in her recent essay, “The Women’s Hour.” Traveling with her sister, she found her childhood home – the hospital their father built...
*STARRED REVIEW Boise, Idaho, is home to the James Castle Collection and Archive, commemorating an internationally renowned local artist who lived most of his 78 years in isolation. The sleek building stands in sharp contrast to the artist's actual lifetime studios: an attic, an abandoned chicken...
*STARRED REVIEW Vikas Adam’s remarkable chameleonic range proves ideal for Samrat Upadhyay’s (Arresting God in Kathmandu) latest superb collection, set mostly in Nepal. Exceptionally gifted with accents, Adam could easily be mistaken for a multi-person cast; he's effortlessly convincing as a disappointed father, a female inmate,...
Helen receives a call from her "Uncle Geoff" (although she's unsure of how they're related) that her 29-year-old adoptive brother has killed himself. Both Helen and her brother were adopted as babies from Korea by a white – some might add willfully culturally illiterate –...
Six Four, the first available-in-English-translation novel from Japanese phenomenon Hideo Yokoyama, requires serious commitments of time and memory space. It runs over 24 audible hours, with so many pertinent players that the print version includes a densely-populated “Cast of Characters.” Dead and missing daughters populate this exquisitely...
It’s the time of the year to be scared witless – and by choice, egads! Gluttons for fear, unite. And brace yourselves for the following 13 diverse hauntings. The Black Isle by Sandi Tan The protagonist begins her life as Ling, the first-born twin in a well-to-do Shanghai clan. Half...
Collin, the titular “chalk artist,” waits tables since twice dropping out of college. Nina’s a high school English teacher with a degree from Harvard; she’s also the only child of the legendary founder of the phenomenal video game company Arkadia. Opposites attract; romance happens. Thinking she’s...
Kym’s first violin was a paper cutout copied from an encyclopedia; her first actual instrument was a “harsh, factory-made thing” on which she immediately taught herself “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” By her first or second lesson, Kym knew playing the violin "was not simply for...
In sleepy Pine Valley, MN, 18-year-old Hattie Hoffman – beloved daughter, excellent student, best friend, adored girlfriend, talented actress – lies dead. Solving her gruesome murder is up to local sheriff Del Goodman, a family friend who watched Hattie grow up. Her English teacher Peter Lund...
