*STARRED REVIEW The story seems familiarly simple. A man and a woman fall in love, but their happy-ever-after is fraught with obstacles. Yet nothing is quite that straightforward in Chigozie Obioma’s (The Fishermen, 2015) latest, starting with his narrator, who happens to be a 700-year-old chi...
Insurrecto by Gina Apostol With shrewd insight, inventive plotting, and stinging history lessons, Gina Apostol, who received the PEN Open Book Award for Gun Dealers’ Daughter (2012), puts the “unremembered” Philippine-American War on literary display. Adjectives such as humorous, playful, and ingenious seem almost disrespectful when describing a book anchored...
The Tale of Cho Ung introduces Korean classic tale to English speakers Despite being “the best-selling fictional narrative during the late Chosŏn period” (1392-1910) of pre-modern Korea, little is known about the provenance of The Tale of Cho Ung. The author remains unknown and its initial composition...
Clearly the internationally lauded Yu Hua's translator of choice, Pomona professor Allan H. Barr anglophones seven early stories Yu (Brothers) wrote between 1987 and 1991. In his edifying introduction, Barr explains that during China's "post-Mao liberalization" (from the late 1970s into early 1980s), "writers devoted...
Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s dozen stories are disturbingly spectacular, made even more so by how he magnifies and exposes the truth. On first reading, the collection might register as speculative fiction, but current headlines about racism, injustice, consumerism, and senseless violence prove...
Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies, 2015) lives in Florida and is married with two sons – not unlike five of the protagonists among the 11 stories here. Unlike with her previous titles, Groff narrates, adding a layer of intimacy to further enhance the first-person perspective...
In one of the most inexcusable examples of careless casting or lazy producing or both, David Peace (Red or Dead) gets utterly short-changed by Ric Jerrom's exasperating performance, from grievous mispronunciations of the majority of the Japanese names and words – including even Peace's protagonist...
*STARRED REVIEW Versatile, seasoned narrator Robin Miles is as comfortable narrating literary historic context as she is effortlessly adopting the vernacular patois of an octogenarian former slave. Published almost 90 years after its completion, Zora Neale Hurston’s (Their Eyes Were Watching God) presentation of Oluale Kossula,...
*STARRED REVIEW Chameleonic narrator Sneha Mathan amplifies Thrity Umrigar’s already spectacular new novel, the long-awaited sequel to the best-selling The Space Between Us (2005). While Umrigar focused on the complicated relationship between employer Sera and servant Bhima in Space, Secrets Between Us shifts from Mumbai’s haves...
That Curtis Sittenfeld bookends her first short story collection with references to Trump seems to signal that bad behavior – dishonesty, betrayal, resentment, even hatred – will be plentiful in between. The agitation she immediately incites with the opening story, “Gender Studies,” about a recently...
Narrators Joy Osmanski and Jacques Roy prove to be convincing partners in propelling two awkward misfits toward each other. Osmanski’s Penny Lee is slightly detached. UT-Austin might be less than 80 miles away, but 18-year-old Penny imagines she’s headed for a whole new world –...
Arthur Less is, well … considerably less, now that he's middle-aged, alone, and pretty much broke. The pinnacle of his novel-writing career might have been his first New York Times review, which while "good," assigned him an epithet that would haunt (taunt?) him in the...
In 1981, Frank is about to fall victim to a deadly worldwide flu pandemic. In exchange for Frank’s recovery, girlfriend Polly time-travels 12 years into the future and commits to 32 months of bonded servitude. Their 1993 reunion plan goes awry when Polly lands in...
*STARRED REVIEW On her 12th birthday, Nisha receives her first diary from Kazi, the family’s cook, presented with prescient words: “he said it was time to start writing things down … someone needs to make a record of the things that will happen because the grown-ups...
*STARRED REVIEW Adjectives like humorous, playful, and ingenious seem almost disrespectful when describing a book anchored by “the worst massacre of [U.S.] Army soldiers in the decades after Custer’s defeat.” The little-known 1901 Balangiga massacre in Samar, Philippines, during the Philippine-American War resulted in the deaths...
Jon Lee Anderson’s Che: A Revolutionary Life (1997) is superbly realized in graphic form by Mexican artist José Hernández, who distills Anderson’s lauded, 812-page original into just more than 400 pages of spectacularly illustrated narrative. Since his 1967 death at 39, Che “has become the most...
The fourth of Mette Ivie Harrison’s 11 planned books for her Linda Wallheim mystery series takes the outspoken Mormon-bishop’s wife from her comfortable Draper, Utah, home into the Spanish community, a few miles in distance but a world away culturally, ethnically, and socioeconomically. Linda accompanies her...
'Killing Commendatore' is the latest evasive, magical, utterly unique novel by Murakami A famous painter succumbing to dementia living out his final days in a posh care facility. A wealthy, middle-aged white-haired man who lives alone in a mountainside white mansion. A motherless schoolgirl whose father...
"I'll tell you how it started," Rachel Lyon’s extraordinary debut promises. "With a simple, tragic accident … and a photograph." A boy is dead after tumbling off the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building. His descent is unintentionally caught on film by the artist living...
FAMOUS ADOPTED PEOPLE, A Story “In My Bones”: Q&A with Alice Stephens “Everyone, it seems, is telling our story but us,” observes Lisa Pearl, the Korean-born, Bethesda, Maryland-raised transracial adoptee protagonist in Alice Stephens’ debut novel, Famous Adopted People, which hits shelves on October 16. The author, who describes...
