Luis Alberto Urrea's 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist for General Nonfiction reads like a heart-thumping thriller, complete with big cars and big guns, desperate men and boys, waiting women, and an enormous body count. That the story is true instantly turns it into a modern tragedy of epic...
Before you open Somaly Mam's astonishing memoir, you need to be prepared to bear witness to some of the most horrific acts a human being can commit against another, especially helpless young girls. Once you begin, the frank, unmitigated writing will not allow you to...
Having been so enthralled by MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Yiyun Li’s debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, then her novel, The Vagrants, I admit I held off on this, her latest collection, for over a year. I seem to have difficulty immediately reading the newest book of...
No one has such an unpredictable, quirky, downright wacky imagination as Haruki Murakami. And even though your brain knows he's created an impossible universe, everything on the page seems so convincing, you'll go along for the ride – any ride with Murakami at the helm. Even almost...
Let the games continue! Volume 8 adds a new character to the roster – cousin Mizuki Asami returns to Japan from his mountaineering adventures with his world-famous father, and moves in with the Tsukishimas. As sweet, polite, and considerate as he is, he almost immediately announces...
All is definitely not fair in love and war ...
Ha Jin has lived through difficult, defining events: the Cultural Revolution in his native China, military service that began when he was a young teenager, immigration and subsequent separation from home and family. On the page, he has vividly reproduced the repression of the Cultural...
Half a century ago today – on October 1, 1961 – Roger Maris of the New York Yankees hit his 61st home run of the season, breaking Babe Ruth's record of 60 set in 1927. I knew you needed this information today (it came in at the...
In case you needed another reminder, Banned Books Week continues for a couple more days ...
Since Craig Thompson's Habibi hit shelves last week (official release date was last Tuesday, September 20), I guess the secret of its magnificence is out ...
Eight years have passed (far too quickly) since I last saw the inimitable Jessica Hagedorn. Her 2003 novel, Dream Jungle, was about to come out and we were in desperate search of boba tea in New York’s East Village. Faced with a closed tea salon...
Melissa Fay Greene first arrived last spring in my mailbox via her latest book, No Biking in the House Without a Helmet, and made me cry. But she also left me tickled with joyous laughter at the antics of her sprawling, multiplying, multi-ethnic family. While Biking made me...
Welcome to Banned Books Week 2011, which begins today and ends October 1. Leading the "Top ten most frequently challenged books of 2010" – at the top for the fifth year in a row, with a respite at #2 in 2009! – is little Tango. Reasons cited: "homosexuality, religious viewpoint,...
An 18-year-old boy, Camilo, is dead, his youthful body prepared and confined forever in a coffin that now sits in a living room, attended by his estranged parents on either side. Through the course of the inaugural night that marks his sudden, violent passing, his...
Although this newest installment arrived months ago, it somehow went missing, thanks to my son's kleptomaniacal tendencies whenever he sees a Kazu Kibuishi title. Just finding it buried amidst his various piles of stuff (he keeps Books 1, 2, and 3 in the car for constant,...
Eight years have passed since Jeffrey Eugenides won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (as well as too many other accolades to list) for this, his second novel, and nine years since it was first published. Nine years later (pattern forming here? – his debut The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex are also...
Little orphan Teodora promises her dying godmother to look after her worthless bed-hopping son. Raised Cinderella-style in a small village in Colombia, Teodora willingly enslaves herself to ensure handsome but immoral Galaor's every comfort, and not surprisingly falls madly in love with him. 'Love is...
Less is indeed more in Palestinian writer Adania Shibli's U.S. debut-in-translation. The deceptively minimal 72 pages of touch hold layered shards from a young girl's life, some shining with promise, others sharp with painful gravity, but undoubtedly an existence shattered at seemingly regular intervals by violence and...
Oooh, such campy, goofy, gory fun, complete with a buff, albeit geeky APA male hero! But don't judge those dweeby glasses just yet ...
Regardless of what is actually happening on the page (even brutality, sometimes tragedy), Michael Ondaatje's writing is something akin to a velvety, soothing dream. In a perfect world, reading (or better yet, listening to ...
