Both the inside and outside covers here are exactly the same: a mostly well-ordered, three-generation family tree ...
Need the verdict first? READ THIS. Stephen Dau's The Book of Jonas is one of those rare, shattering, lingering, breathtaking-at-unexpected-moments debut novels that arrive so perfectly formed you're left both haunted (wondering what you could possibly read next to dispel the terror) and grateful (utterly so, that...
Maybe it's the craziness of the season, but I've really been appreciating short story collections. This latest title from Emma Donoghue – the author of the phenomenal Room – is an intriguingly composed compilation: Donoghue presents a story introduced with a specific city and year, then gives the 'ripped-from-the-headlines'...
Here's my 'why-I-read-this-book-scenario': a 21st-century equivalent to the mail-order bride from Bangladesh, her middle-class white American engineer sponsor hubby, the suburban New York life they attempt to share ...
Joel Pickford's titular journey took him through an 8,000-mile trek to some of the most remote villages in Laos, five years of interviewing Hmong refugees, and five years of reading Hmong history and ethnography. The result is a gorgeous, startling, intimate portrait of an ethnic...
* STARRED REVIEW The recipient of international accolades – including Canada’s coveted Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction (2010) for its original Canadian debut in French – this extraordinary first novel unfolds like ethereal poetry. The enigmatic title means “a small stream and, figuratively, a flow, a discharge—of...
I haven't picked up a Geraldine Brooks title since her 2001 debut novel, Year of Wonders, which promptly became an international bestseller. I definitely had that sense of 'wow' when I finished, but then I inexplicably ignored the rest of her titles ...
Don't let the seasonal title fool you ...
April is National Poetry Month. Every once in a long while, even a poetry-dullard like me has a poetic WOW!-moment. Certainly I'm not alone ...
First things first: Let's try to clear up some of the oxymoronic labels. Although this title is classified as a novel written by Dave Eggers (he of bad boy-genius fame for his debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and, of course, the mini-empire that is McSweeney's),...
Escape from Camp 14 is the most devastating book I have ever read. Perhaps the resilience of youth got me through the aftermath of learning about slavery, the Holocaust, even Iris Chang’s now-classic The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust, the title I previously held...
Reading these double memoirs of a native Inuit girlhood during the 1940s in far northern Canada is a searing experience. What was done to children disguised as progress and opportunity (not to mention in the name of a Christian God) is a tragedy that is...
At school, 12-year-old Mimi Lu is better known as Smelly-Loo because "[h]er parents forced her to drink all sorts of smelly brews" – concocted by her herbalist doctor father – that lingered on her clothes, pigtails, skin, and even her breath. "[Y]ou are Chinese. Be...
Somewhere buried in these almost 300 pages (or just over nine hours if you're listening to the husky voice of actress Daphne Rubin-Vega) is a really good book about the quinceañera – the 15th birthday celebration of a Latina which marks her maturity from little girl...
Ah, this day of mislaid Hallmark hearts ...
The first sentence of Tsitsi Dangarembga's semi-autobiographical novel sets a haunting tone: "I was not sorry when my brother died." With his death, 13-year-old Tambu is presented with a profound opportunity: even though she's a girl, as the now-eldest child in her poor village family...
Nepal-born Manjushree Thapa, herself a peripatetic hybrid of East and West with an American education and Canadian ties, is one of a handful of Nepali authors successfully writing in English. This, her latest novel (and only her second in her almost two-decade writing history with seven titles...
This is one of those spectacular titles that the less you know about it, the better your read. The amazing levels of meaning contained in the title alone makes it worth your utmost attention. Of course, if you haven't been hiding under a rock (like me),...
Earlier this year at that sprawling, unnavigable, kvetchfest known as AWP – the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs – I got to introduce and moderate the very best panel of the long weekend (the title alone was the most memorable: "I Am Not...
Almost 10 years after Julie Otsuka made her spectacular literary debut with When the Emperor Was Divine, I remain even more convinced that Emperor is the best book I've ever read about the Japanese American imprisonment during World War II. Truth be told, Emperor ranks so high on...
