River Dean, 17, is not a bad kid: he's got warm relationships with his family (except his runaway dad), does well at school, and has good friends. But when Penny, the love of his life, dumps him, River starts making awful decisions, starting with stumbling...
*STARRED REVIEW Guy Lockard has assumed the mantle of narrator-of-choice for Jason Reynolds’s fiction: Ghost (2016 National Book Award finalist) is Lockard's third Reynolds title, following As Brave as You and Rashad's chapters in All American Boys. Here, as seventh grader Castle "Ghost" Crenshaw, Lockard performs...
*STARRED REVIEW A mother, Soledad, flees Cuba, abandoning her revolutionary husband Uxmal and absconding with their 12-year-old twins Ulises and Isabel. She bypasses Miami for Hartford, CT, finding work as a court stenographer, making her the transcriber of other people's words. Although Uxmal’s presence never seems to...
*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...
When 19-year-old Jim Thorpe (1888-1955) joined Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian Industrial School's football team in 1907, it was the fastest team in the country, "the most creative, the most fun to watch." Already the school's track star, Thorpe was, self-admittedly, "a scarecrow dressed for football" when...
*STARRED REVIEW "There's magic in this world. And miracles." In his second translated work to hit stateside (after The Investigation), bestselling Korean author J.M. Lee – again linguistically enabled by gifted translator Chi-Young Kim – will make you believe. Lee's silent protagonist sits in a New York...
*STARRED REVIEW Although publishing 10 months after Viet Thanh Nguyen won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer, this collection precedes his novel by decades (the earliest entry dates from 1997). In a pre-Pulitzer interview, Nguyen credits his 15-year experience "characterized by drudgery and despair, laced with...
Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, MO. Lezley McSpadden didn't see her 18-year-old son die, "but as his mother, I do know one thing better than anyone, and that's how to tell my son's...
The Recovered & The Unrestored Let me begin with a reader’s confession: Without a doubt, Shobha Rao’s debut, An Unrestored Woman, is the best short fiction collection I’ve read this year. These dozen stories are savage and empathetic, brutal and lyrical, mournful and celebratory as well. At...
Colin Dickey (Afterlives of the Saints) cites a statistic that 45 percent of Americans believe in ghosts, and 30 percent profess to have had firsthand encounters. Such undying fascination means there was no shortage of stories to choose from when Dickey spent several years traveling...
The Avalon Family Residence might sound nice, but it's not: "peeling paint, cockroaches…our tiny room." Dèja, her parents, and her two younger siblings are homeless, currently staying in a Brooklyn shelter. Her father can't work, and her exhausted mother is menially employed. As Dèja starts fifth...
*STARRED REVIEW Yan Lianke's latest translated-into-English title offers multiple rewarding options. As straightforward narrative, it follows the astounding transformation of Explosion, a rural mountain village, into a "megalopolis" through the entangled lives of the Kong family's four sons – a teacher, a politician, a soldier, and...
Mao Dun Award–winning novelist Liu Zhenyun (The Cook, the Crook, and the Real Estate Tycoon, 2015) adroitly confronts Very Big Topics – family, education, work, bureaucracy, the military, history – in his first translated-into-English story collection. “Tofu” exposes the numbing tribulations of being a poor family...
Tokyo-born, Berlin-domiciled Yoko Tawada (Facing the Bridge, 2007) returns with another fantastical and entertaining novel that combines a broken family saga, socio-political-environmental enlightenment, a treatise on writing, and bitingly well-placed satire. Seamlessly translated from German by the award-winning Susan Bernofsky, Memoirs of a Polar Bear introduces...
An ephemeral, atmospheric painting, Elegy, is at the core of Wendy Lee’s third and most ambitious novel (Happy Family, 2008; Across a Green Ocean, 2015). An unknown, 30-year-sojourning Chinese artist is paid a pittance to recreate a missing canvas. A desperate New York gallery owner...
As explosive growth transforms 1970s South Korea into an international powerhouse, sociopolitical upheaval becomes unavoidable in daily life. Into the maelstrom of such spectacular change, first-novelist Grace Yoojin Wuertz – Seoul-born, U.S.-raised, Yale- and NYU-degreed – drops two women onto the elite campus of Seoul...
On Secrets and the Long, Long Process Journalist Vanessa Hua spent the last couple of decades filing articles from around the globe – China and Ecuador, Burma and Panama, and beyond – which surely gave her the worldly familiarity that resonates throughout her fiction debut, Deceit...
Lucas and Katya spend a year in love as boarding school seniors and have a baby. Their parting leaves Lucas estranged throughout daughter Vera’s childhood; he eventually graduates to being a weekend dad. At 16, Vera goes to a party she shouldn’t have, which ends with...
Jazzy is still single at almost 27. When her BFF-quartet lost Sher to the dream they all aspire to – marrying an "ang moh," a wealthy Western expat, because local Singaporean men "are a bit fussy" about "older girls" – Jazzy decides she needs a...
Accused of brutally murdering her husband, Zeba lands in jail. A mother of four, wife to Kamal, and obedient to Kamal's family, Zeba can't remember what happened. She remains silently resigned, realizing that in contemporary Afghanistan, just being a woman is enough to threaten not...
