With very good reason, Jennifer Egan's fifth title, A Visit from the Goon Squad, won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, announced earlier this month. As with most major award winners, I try to take a look or a listen (forget the cat; curiosity...
"I always thought the biggest problem in my life was my name, Naomi Soledad León Outlaw, but little did I know that it was the least of my troubles, or that someday I would live up to it." So opens Pam Muñoz Ryan’s swiftly moving coming-of-age...
First off, Samrat Upadhyay is one of my favorite short story-tellers. His debut Arresting God in Kathmandu remains one of the most memorable collections I've ever read, and a quote from the review I...
I'm not so sure about my tween son reading this sooner than later (it's part of his English curriculum this school year) ...
Tracy White’s graphic sort-of-autobiography is “only mostly true because I skipped over things, moved events around, embellished, and occasionally just plain made things up,” she explains on the first page. “The technical term for this is dramatic license. I used it,” she adds in the...
