*STARRED REVIEW Experienced narrator Robin Miles is the ideal proxy for Gay's difficult women, many of whom are not so much difficult as living lives that have been made difficult, onerous, or tragic by others. Embodying various ages, ethnicities, and backgrounds, Miles refreshes and adapts her...
*STARRED REVIEW Commemorating 10 extraordinary years of PalFest, the Palestine Festival of Literature, mother-son cofounders Soueif (Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, 2014) and Hamilton (The City Always Wins, 2017) gathered 47 literary luminaries to create this essential testimony, including Suad Amiry, J. M. Coetzee, Teju...
*STARRED REVIEW Loss and longing cause the men and women in Yoon's (Once the Shore; Snow Hunters) second collection to move, and often keep moving, sometimes in search of sanctuary, other times seeking escape. A doctor returns from war to his childhood home where his mother died;...
'Men Without Women' is Murakami at his whimsical best For Haruki Murakami aficionados, reading Men Without Women, Murakami's 20th book to be translated into English, is a whimsical delight. The seven stories in his fourth story collection present another captivating treasure hunt of familiar Murakami motifs...
*STARRED REVIEW Filmmaker/playwright/writer/activist Kathleen Collins was a multi-faceted, multi-talented pioneer who died at just 46. In 2014, indie distributor Milestone Films reintroduced her groundbreaking 1982 film, Losing Ground, one of the first movies directed by an African American woman. Beyond the celluloid, this posthumously published 16-story...
The dozen stories in Ali Smith's (How To Be Both) latest collection share a common characteristic: a contagious sense of wordplay, from obscure etymology ("buxom" originally meant "obedient, compliant, gracious") in "Last," to multiple meanings of "fraud" linking D.H. Lawrence to credit card theft in...
*STARRED REVIEW Although publishing 10 months after Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer, this collection precedes his novel by decades (the earliest entry dates from 1997). In a pre-Pulitzer interview, Nguyen credits his 15-year experience "characterized by drudgery and despair, laced with...
*STARRED REVIEW Wildly varying in topics from a seaside disaster in the titular opening story to an unlikely relationship that develops between an older man and the suicide attemptee he rescues in "The Weir," Mark Haddon’s nine stories here are thematically linked through a common sense...
Wacky and weird, writing and literature professor Sequoia Nagamatsu’s fiction debut is a 12-piece collection that defies easy categorization as an amalgam of sci-fi/fantasy, horror, and black comedy overlaid with ancient-to-contemporary Japanese myth and culture. Nagamatsu’s atypical characters include the “Margaret Mead of the Kaiju [strange...
*STARRED REVIEW To bring Adam Johnson’s six stories – which together won the 2015 National Book Award for fiction – to waiting ears takes a village of seasoned narrators. In “Nirvana,” Jonathan McClain deftly voices a desperate husband who uses technology to soothe his ill wife. Dominic Hoffman –...
*STARRED REVIEW This is not your ordinary Hollywood memoir: no script doctor or publicist seems to have embellished or sanitized Tony/Emmy/Obie/Golden Globe-winning actress Mary-Louise Parker's first book. Written as a series of letters to almost three dozen "Mr."s both real and imagined, Parker's work captures past...
If Bruno Bettelheim's classic The Uses of Enchantment posited that fairy tales could help children understand their darkest fears, then Michael Cunningham's (The Hours) reenvisioned Other Tales charges adults to challenge perspectives. Ten stories are turned every-which-way by the author, who deftly subverts with both...
So it wasn't even dusk yet and already the spine was tingling as soon as I opened the book. I kept looking around to make sure what was on the page hadn't somehow escaped and was about to pounce on me. With Halloween just over...
A "cheapskate" who longs for a wife who will work hard but never eat, a greedy young man who attempts to steal his brother's good fortune, a magic "hood" that allows the wearer to understand animals, a boy whose nap lasts three years, a wily fox who...
Rad American Women A-Z is the first-ever kids' title in 60 years of "storied history" from San Francisco's iconic bookseller/publisher City Lights. What a way to grab attention ...
*STARRED REVIEW Few writers, even the most seasoned, can produce collections of evenly superb stories. Mia Alvar triumphs on her first try. Her nine stories reflect her own peripatetic background (Manila born, Bahrain/New York raised, Harvard/Columbia educated), featuring a cast of immigrants, expats, travelers, runaways, and...
If you're already a manga/anime aficionado, feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph. If this is the first time you're hearing the titular word, henshin, then stay with me for a few lines. In Japanese – 変身 – the characters literally mean "change" and "body," respectively, and...
If I were to choose the one book that affected me most this year – the one that ran the entire spectrum from giddiest to maddest, from eye-opening in wonder to eye-scrunching in horror – this is it. Bad Feminist has forever changed the way I read,...
It's National Hispanic Heritage Month ...
