“I want to write a novel that will allow young people who are tired of living to have a break from their own lives.” This is the starting point for Eto Mori’s tale, first published in Japan in 1998 and now a classic. Issues challenging...
Mexican poet, writer, and essayist José Emilio Pacheco's novella Battles in the Desert returns in a glorious 40th-anniversary edition, re-translated by Katherine Silver from her own decades-old original. Award-winning author Fernanda Melchor appends an illuminating afterword that contextualizes the coming-of-age classic in the Mexican canon. Carlos, still...
The year is 1885 and Mei and her father, Ah Hao, work in a Sierra Nevada logging camp in this mesmerizing middle-grade debut by author/illustrator Shing Yin Khor (The American Dream?). The first few pages of Khor's clever graphic novel delineates underlying racial disparities: "Every night,...
Get ready to cheer for this #OwnVoices victory with an author and narrator who are both Argentinian American, presented here in perfect synch. Sol Madariaga might be new to audiobooks, but her acting gigs across multiple continents have well-prepared her to fluently cipher Yamile Saied...
Renowned for his international travelogues – Pyongyang; Shenzhen; Jerusalem – Guy Delisle now mines his adolescence for a magnetic Factory Summers. Before he became an award-winning graphic auteur, Delisle at 16 worked in a Quebec City pulp and paper mill where his father was an...
China Room, the outstanding third novel by Sunjeev Sahota, ends with a black-and-white image of an older woman holding a crying infant. That photo – displayed in a dining room in China Room – is the dual narrative's pivotal connector: a "great-grandmother ...
Three months after the Pearl Harbor bombings, rumors of racist mass eviction became reality when President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, unlawfully condemning 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps across the western U.S. Following political leaders spouting conspiracy...
*STARRED REVIEW Women alone populate the extraordinary seven stories in Shoko's Smile by bestselling Korean author Choi Eunyoung, who makes her English-language debut, smoothly translated by Sung Ryu. From daughters to grandmothers, Choi's narrators remain in motion, not only physically but chronologically, each assessing significant past events...
Mettie Ivie Harrison is no stranger to highlighting the complicated intricacies of the Utah Mormon communities in which she lives. Her bestselling Linda Wallheim mystery series unmasked domestic abuse in The Bishop's Wife; anti-LGBTQIA doctrines in His Right Hand; polygamous patriarchy in For Time and All Eternities; immigration...
*STARRED REVIEW "Brutal" doesn't convey enough of the utter horror of Mieko Kawakami's sophomore import, Heaven. Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd, who enabled the stupendous success of Kawakami's English debut novel, Breasts and Eggs, Heaven further confirms Kawakami's superb literary ability to expose and...
In the almost-quarter-century since his manga debut, Junji Ito has undoubtedly ascended to world-renown for his prolific tales of horror. Translated into English by Jocelyne Allen, who also translated his Eisner-winning Frankenstein, Ito’s latest imported collection opens with the five-part titular “Lovesickness.” In relentlessly foggy Nazumi,...
*STARRED REVIEW Perhaps what is most noticeable upon opening Pik-Shuen Fung’s elegiac debut is all the white space. Paragraphs, phrases, words, even detached letters float across the pages, undoubtedly an ethereal reflection of lost chances, missing time, stolen opportunities, and spaces impossible to fill. For most of...
Welcome to Asian Pacific American (APA) Heritage Month. The year remains somber, as the APA community combats dramatically increasing anti-Asian violence around the country and continues to mourn the eight people, including six women of Asian descent, killed in a Georgia mass shooting. Despite a U.S....
Poet/singer Ishle Yi Park crafts an elegiac debut novel-in-verse featuring star-crossed teens, a "rebel/ Romeo & Juliet." From the opening line of Angel & Hannah, Park immediately commands complicity in sharing something secret involving diverse backgrounds: "Psst," she warns, "Ven acá. Illuwah" – "come here," in Spanish,...
Once upon a time, two Bosnian girls arrived at kindergarten with paper-doll selfies. Sara’s mother made hers, garbed in pink and glittery. Lejla’s was blank. “[I]t’s not like I wear the same clothes every day,” she insisted, as if already aware that future incarnations –...
*STARRED REVIEW Kyle Lukoff has already received acclaim for his picture books, including his #OwnVoices 2020 Stonewall Award-winning When Aidan Became a Brother. Lukoff's middle-grade debut, Too Bright to See, is another illuminating story that explores gender identity, featuring a trans tween who's finally ready to...
*STARRED REVIEW Veteran narrator Mozhan Marnò has one of those gratifyingly recognizable, sigh-inducing audiobook voices that immediately immerses readers. Here, for 12 hours, she commands Afghan American pediatrician-turned-novelist Nadia Hashimi’s (A House without Windows, 2018) latest, ciphering the multi-pronged epic over decades and across continents, cultures, and...
*STARRED REVIEW While the story arc might sound familiar – other-side-of-the-world refugees who endure challenging lives in the U.S. – Nguyen’s gentle precision nevertheless produces an extraordinary debut with undeniable resonance. As the MFA-ed, prestigiously fellowshipped (Lambda, Tin House) editor-in-chief of diaCRITICS, Nguyen ciphers all that...
Here’s where veteran narrator Lisa Flanagan excels: unflaggingly individualizing myriad varied characters. Here’s where she disappoints: stumbling over non-English words and using a grating French accent. Quibbles aside, Flanagan consistently, remarkably maintains distinct voices for the peripatetic Preston family in Liese O'Halloran Schwarz’s (The Possible...
*STARRED REVIEW “In my lifetime, I’ve had at least three mothers,” Grace M. Cho writes. After surviving the Korean War, Cho’s mother worked as a bar girl at a U.S. naval base during the U.S. occupation of South Korea. In 1971, she married Cho’s father, a...
