I Live Here by Mia Kirschner, J.B. MacKinnon, Paul Shoebridge, and Michael Simons [in Bloomsbury Review]
01 Nov, by in Adult Readers, Graphic Title/Manga/Manwha, Memoir, Myanmarese (Burmese), Nonfiction, Repost, Thai, Young Adult Readers
A genre-defying four-book documentary that captures the raw lives of refugees surviving war in Chechnya, the deadly sex-trade along the Burma/Thai border, globalization in Mexico, and AIDS in Malawi. Sometimes, the jaw just drops in utterly...
With amazingly effective simplicity, artist 
A 2007 Booker Prize nominee, Sinha’s third title is presented as a series of 23 directly transcribed tapes, spoken by a creature called “Animal,” who was once human before an industrial chemical catastrophe (inspired by the...
Something magical happens when prize-winning novelist Edwidge Danticat strings words together. From the most trivial details to breathtaking moments of enormous gravity, Danticat uses words as charms that gently beckon readers into her world and make...
At the heart of M.G. Vassanji's sixth novel, The Assassin's Song, is an exercise in perspective. Definitions of right and wrong, truth and deception, the chosen and outcast – especially in matters having to do with...
Four short stories and a longer novella are linked together to create a mosaic of disparate voices that share a visceral longing for a time – and place – forever past. Chu adroitly leads readers through...
Interweaving his own multigenerational family history, Thant thoughtfully presents the troubled story of his homeland from ancient times to its colonized modern legacy. Thant’s grandfather, U Thant, figures prominently in the title, once a small town...
From the “godfather of manga” – who also had a medical degree! – comes the first English translation of the mysterious story of a dedicated young doctor, Kirihito Osanai, who is initially sent to a remote...
A young woman abandons her promising corporate job to seek out and photograph the scattered stories of women around the world. This slim, densely packed debut gives voice to eight questioning souls – some silenced by...
I have to admit that I had never heard of Indian graphic novels (just not on my radar, even though I have a heavy South Asian diasporic literary bent because...
For the average American, Tibet is not so much a troubled faraway land, but an ethereal concept marked by the kind face of the Dalai Lama, often in the company of devotee Richard Gere.
“In the West,...
Loss dominates the lives of the inhabitants of a crumbling, stately home on the Indian-Nepali border along the Himalayas. The Cambridge University-educated, self-hating judge’s isolated life is disrupted by the arrival of his young granddaughter, Sai,...
As Najwa loses everything important in her life – her country, her father, her mother, her brother, her lover – she finds solace by embracing the strict tenets of fundamental Islam. While the book offers insight...
Two American GIs stationed in Korea get caught up in a complicated casino robbery – and the layers only thicken from there. ‘Course, where there are GIs, there are prostitutes – don’t...
In spite of its devastating moments, this is one fabulous novel about a billion-rupee quiz show winner, a lá Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, who is unjustly arrested for cheating. Rescued from being further tortured,...
The first available translation of important fiction highlighting the Japanese colonization of Korea: Kannani exposes the brutality endured by Koreans at the hands of their Japanese oppressors – even among the children – while Document follows...
Here the connecting thread is that of place: a changing, bustling Bangalore at the core of fabulous stories about a man who falls in love too late with the wrong woman, an old man...
The title, Hua Song, means “in praise of the Chinese community.” Undoubtedly, the remarkable book is a beautifully rendered, bilingual record of Chinese communities throughout the world, past and present.
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