*STARRED REVIEW Jackson was 7 the last time he saw his bubble-bathing, purple jelly bean-loving friend Crenshaw. But now that Jackson is 10, the oversize imaginary feline explains, "You need a bigger friend now." Jackson and his family must sell everything they can to pay their overdue rent...
*STARRED REVIEW "This, reader, is a mother-daughter story," the American writer-who-is-also-the-mother insists in the latest from Lidia Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase). The mother-writer has battled debilitating bouts of depression but she's survived thus far, until her daughter's stillborn birth spirals her into silent withdrawal. In an...
*STARRED REVIEW "I was taught to avoid showing off," Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson (writing, Columbia University; On Michael Jackson) begins. "But isn't all memoir a form of showing off?" That hesitation permeates throughout, the restraint perfectly mimicked in Robin Miles's elegant recitation. This work is a...
“A house. A writing machine. …[And her] animals” are the “home” Sandra Cisneros needs to “feel like writing.” The MacArthur “Genius”-author of The House on Mango Street – one of those celebrated pivotal titles readers never forget – offers the “stories from my life [that]...
Thanks to his "fellow countryman," our peripatetic Turkey-bound Englishman, Mr. Smith, finds himself welcomed into a lavish Persian home. "I'm impressed, Boss," his guide and companion Ali remarks, "You sure know some powerful people." Momentarily glimpsed but intentionally hidden in the sprawling compound is Anis, the...
Sam, Samir, and Nina met in law school in Paris. Sam and Nina were lovers. While Sam was briefly away, Samir shared Nina's bed, after which Sam attempted suicide and won Nina back. Fast-forward almost two decades: Sam and Nina are poor and desperate but still...
Here’s a ‘did you know …?’-fact about the Smithsonian Museums … they’re all free, all the time. That’s not the case in many museums around the country, so the Smithsonian created Museum Day Live!, an annual event in which participating museums across the country open...
Linda Wallheim, who debuted in YA author Mette Ivie Harrison’s first adult title, The Bishop's Wife, returns to solve her second murder. For Linda, being a devout Mormon isn't a barrier to speaking her mind and demanding justice in the men-centric community in which being...
Ria Parker has avoided going home to Chicago for far too long, offering up convenient excuses about her demanding Bollywood career. With her beloved more-brother-than-cousin's impending wedding, Ria finally heads stateside from Mumbai to face the family. For 10 years, she's managed to avoid first-and-only-love Vikram,...
Whoa! The year-and-a-half wait for this, the latest volume in Kazu Kibuishi’s bestselling Amulet adventures, is finally over!! And was it worth the 18 months of excruciating patience? You betcha! So listen up: first and foremost, if this is the first Amulet cover you're seeing, stop here and...
Originally published in 2004, then 23-year-old Uzodinma Iweala’s debut novel – which began as the author's Harvard senior thesis under the direction of Jamaica Kincaid – reappears 11 years later in two additional incarnations: as an acclaimed film directed by Cory Fukunaga and this mesmerizing...
*STARRED REVIEW This is not your ordinary Hollywood memoir: no script doctor or publicist seems to have embellished or sanitized Tony/Emmy/Obie/Golden Globe-winning actress Mary-Louise Parker's first book. Written as a series of letters to almost three dozen "Mr."s both real and imagined, Parker's work captures past...
*STARRED REVIEW "My brothers and I became fishermen in January of 1996 after our father moved out of Akure, a town in the west of Nigeria, where we had lived together all our lives," explains nine-year-old Benjamin. With Father's strict daily oversight missing and Mother busy with...
'The Queen of the Night' blends opera and mystery into a grandiose read Fourteen-plus years after his Whiting Award-ed debut, Edinburgh, hit shelves in late 2001, literary social media-darling Alexander Chee returns with The Queen of the Night, in which another – albeit very different –...
At age 6, Özge Samanci was desperate to be "on the other side of the binoculars" – that is, to be at school, being watched by her mother from across the street, just as she and her mother occasionally spotted and waved at her older sister Pelin,...
Perhaps "fractured fairy tale" isn't the most inviting descriptor, but the growing genre of parodied, subverted new versions of familiar stories can be fabulously enticing, not to mention downright inventive and – oxymoronic as it sounds – incredibly original. Thanks to Canada's marvelous indie Kids Can...
‘In Other Words’ traces Jhumpa Lahiri's love affair with the Italian language A few days before Christmas 1994, Jhumpa Lahiri made her first trip to Italy. She left a week later, in “[l]ove at first sight” not with a person, but with the Italian language. Over...
If Bruno Bettelheim's classic The Uses of Enchantment posited that fairy tales could help children understand their darkest fears, then Michael Cunningham's (The Hours) reenvisioned Other Tales charges adults to challenge perspectives. Ten stories are turned every-which-way by the author, who deftly subverts with both...
Volume 1 promised "This is the beginning of a new age" on its intriguing cover page. And yep, did it ever deliver – for oldster-fans delirious with gleeful nostalgia and a brand new generation of young 'uns lucky to discover this hero-version-2.0! Yes, indeedy, Ultraman is...
*STARRED REVIEW Ruth Bader Ginsberg (b. 1933) is legend: she was Columbia University's first female tenured professor; she published the first casebook on sex discrimination; she was the second woman to sit on the nation's highest court; and she was the first Supreme Court justice to...
