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...
*STARRED REVIEW Maaza Mengiste’s indelible first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gate (2010), put Ethiopian historical fiction on countless best-of, must-read, and award lists. Her monumental new novel draws inspiration from her great-grandmother, who as the eldest and in Mulan-style answered Emperor Haile Selassie’s demand for first...
He’s had almost two dozen names, yet his story was forgotten for 40 years. More recently, despite their violent 20th-century histories, four countries – China, Japan, and his native Korea, now cleaved into North and South – all claim him as a local hero. Perhaps best...
Born to a Cairo-based merchant father, raised by his paternal grandmother in Nablus, educated in a Constantinople boarding school, Midhat Kamal is already a peripatetic polyglot when he arrives in France. While he studies medicine at the University of Montpellier, he lives with a doctor...
When the Korean peninsula was divided into North and South in 1953, the consequences were especially tragic for separated families. In the six-plus decades since the ceasefire, reunion – politically and personally – has proven virtually impossible. On either side of the Military Demarcation Line,...
Last Boat Out of Shanghai has four stories at once personal and universal As the child of two refugees, Helen Zia can speak to the effects of displacement, separation, and the personal costs of survival, adaptation, and reinvention. As an advocate for Asian American and other minority communities,...
*STARRED REVIEW They meet at age 7. Young-sook and her mother are working their garden; Mi-ja crouches among the sweet-potato plants, desperate to eat. They are on Korea’s Jeju Island, “known for its Three Abundances of wind, stones, and women, it was also acknowledged for lacking...
Insurrecto by Gina Apostol With shrewd insight, inventive plotting, and stinging history lessons, Gina Apostol, who received the PEN Open Book Award for Gun Dealers’ Daughter (2012), puts the “unremembered” Philippine-American War on literary display. Adjectives such as humorous, playful, and ingenious seem almost disrespectful when describing a book anchored...
*STARRED REVIEW Adjectives like humorous, playful, and ingenious seem almost disrespectful when describing a book anchored by “the worst massacre of [U.S.] Army soldiers in the decades after Custer’s defeat.” The little-known 1901 Balangiga massacre in Samar, Philippines, during the Philippine-American War resulted in the deaths...
Nasty neighbors, otherworldly children, and malevolent monsters populate some of the 22 traditional Japanese folktales in Ozaki’s century-old collection, reissued with an introduction by Australian academic Lucy Fraser. In her 1903 preface, Ozaki – whose father was Japanese, mother, English – that her “stories are not...
*STARRED REVIEW During Japan’s brutal occupation of Korea (1910–45), marked by systematic suppression of the Korean language, culture, and identity, Yi T’aejun produced stories that were “considered among the best of his time.” Translator Janet Poole’s impressive introduction not only contextualizes Yi’s significance in the Korean canon...
After introducing a stupendous community of left-behind stateside military wives in her debut collection, You Know When the Men Are Gone, Siobhan Fallon presents in her first novel two women who have accompanied their U.S. Army husbands to Jordan. Shared circumstances ease Cassie and Margaret...
'Adua' explores the relationship between colonizer and colonized Before Igiaba Scego’s novel, Adua, even begins, what’s instantly striking is the “Contents” page, which reveals a trio of chapter titles – “Adua,” “Talking-To,” “Zoppe” – that repeat over 30 chapters. Adua is the daughter, Zoppe the father,...
*STARRED REVIEW A decade after her international best-selling debut, Free Food for Millionaires (2007), Min Jin Lee’s follow-up is an exquisite, haunting epic that crosses almost a century, four generations, and three countries while depicting an ethnic Korean family that cannot even claim a single shared...
Flood of Fire brings the astounding, exceptional Ibis Trilogy to a close Readers of this review will fall into two categories: (1) Those who are already two-thirds invested in the Ibis Trilogy, and (2) Newbies who might be wondering if continuing the perusal of this review...
The Meursault Investigation cleverly builds on The Stranger by Camus In a New Yorker interview this March, Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud spoke of reading the iconic 1942 classic, The Stranger by Albert Camus – in which a man arbitrarily commits murder and is tried and sentenced...
This latest from Amit Chaudhuri (Freedom Song; The Immortals) offers minimal plot: a 22-year-old homesick Indian literature student and aspiring poet wakes in his shabby London studio, practices his singing, meets his university tutor, delivers his rent, and visits his uncle Radhesh, with whom he...
Before reading another word, click here to catch up. You need to know how we got here before you can go on! As Part Three opens, Toph Beifong is "literally carrying the weight of our world." She's trapped underground, with Katara, Satoru, her father, and many...
Just to be totally up front, we have four months of waiting for Part Three. Just saying (and sighing). Until then, in case you need to flash back, here's a look at Part One, which landed Avatar Aang and his motley entourage at what should have been the...
Christy Jordan-Fenton and her mother-in-law Margaret Pokiak-Fenton began publishing stories in 2010 about the older Pokiak-Fenton's difficult childhood as a young Inuit child growing up in Canada's Northwest Territories. Their four books in four years are comprised of two titles for middle grade readers, Fatty Legs and A Stranger at Home, which were then...
